Tips & Techniques - August 1995

When writing non-Presentation Manager threads in a PM program, make sure you call WinCancelShutdown. This prevents the system from sending you WM_QUIT messages and allows you to gracefully terminate your own threads.
 * Tip:

If you use Idle class thread in your programs, make sure you change them back to Regular class before terminating the program. Not doing so might cause the application to never go away because the CPU is so busy the idle thread never gets any time to terminate.
 * Tip:

The CALL=\OS2\CMD.EXE statement inserted near the end of the CONFIG.SYS file will give you a command prompt after kernel initialization but before Presentation Manager initialization. PM will not initialize until you enter EXIT.
 * Tip:

This is useful when developing DLLs used by PM and/or the Workplace Shell because you can copy new versions of DLLs before PM opens and locks them. In this environment, REXX has not been initialized yet. Don't run any PM programs, buy COPY works fine.

Possible uses:
 * Delete the \SPOOL directory before the spooler initializes.
 * Copy over new printer driver DRVs.
 * Rename the \OPENDOC subdirectory to enable/disable OpenDoc without changing the CONFIG.SYS file.