Forums Bug Reports 7.45 Desktop dialogs & $TIMEOUT identifier

I have not created a dialog in a couple of versions of mIRC, but it seems that now when using /dialog -md table name the dialog is not added to the taskbar.

I was helping out someone making some code and decided to create the following code:



I was expecting the output to be Timeout time: 10, but instead I got Timeout time: $timeoutsecs.

Are you reporting two separate issues here? It seems unclear. I would recommend reporting bugs individually so they can be properly tracked and discussed without hijacking threads.

I can reproduce the $timeout thing (I'm guessing it is a reserved identifier) so I will focus on the dialog issue:

The dialog is added to the taskbar for me. If you're on Windows 8/10, note that the taskbar is slightly different than it used to be, and by default, windows are grouped together near the tiled application-- and you will not see titles either. The window is still available if you mouseover mIRC in the taskbar, though.

Do you not see this? What OS are you testing this on?

edit: $timeout is indeed a reserved identifier as of 2006 (v6.17) which works like $true/$false/$null. See /help $input for documentation on this value. That makes this expected behavior, and you cannot use timeout as an alias name.

Yes, I thought of creating separate threads after I had created it. But at the time both issues came up and did not think straight.

To go back on the to the dialog, after multiple test with multiple versions of mIRC I found that the "problem" was caused by using the switch "a" together with "m" and "d" (/dialog -mda test test). I am currently using windows 10.

So -a and -d seem contradictory to one another. A desktop window has no "parent", but -a specifically makes it so the currently active window is the parent.

Now, this might not have affected other versions of Windows in the past due to the way the DWM worked with MDI children, but it seems completely understandable that an update to the DWM makes it so any window handle with a parent does not show up in the taskbar.

I would generally consider this expected behavior, since, fundamentally, -a and -d do not really make sense together. In other words, you either want your window to be a root window (desktop), or you want it to be a child, but never both. The workaround is simply to avoid -a if you want a desktop window.

There's also not much mIRC can do here, unless there is a new way to force a child of an MDI window to have a spot in the taskbar, which I would bet isn't possible (though I could be wrong).