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June 30, 2005Jun 30, 200506/30/05One of the less-known features of Windows is the roaming user profile. I know that this is not well-known because I often see suggestions that fail to take the roaming user profile scenario into account. Indeed, if your program behaves badly enough,
June 29, 2005Jun 29, 200506/29/05Why can’t all the registry key needed by Windows Setup be precomputed and splorted at one go? One reason is that Windows Setup can be customized via a so-called “unattend file“, which means that a lot of the work cannot be precalculated.
June 29, 2005Jun 29, 200506/29/05Professionals at work is the title of this series of unattributed pictures. (Via memepool Nov 26, 2004.) I think they speak for themselves.
(I apologize in advance for the lowbrow advertisements on the page.)
June 28, 2005Jun 28, 200506/28/05Francesco (“Ces”) Marciuliano is the author of the comic strip Sally Forth. In his blog, Drink at Work he expounds on whatever tickles his fancy. (Warning: Includes strong language, adult situations, and political views.) Sure, the stories on writing a cartoon are fun,
June 28, 2005Jun 28, 200506/28/05If you go browsing around MSDN, you’ll find that code samples tend to call ZeroMemory explicitly rather than using “= { 0 }” notation. Why is that?
To make it clearer for people who are used to other programming languages.
Like it or not,
June 27, 2005Jun 27, 200506/27/05Many Windows information mechanisms are based on message broadcasts, among them DDE, WM_FONTCHANGE, and changes in system settings. Why do these mechanisms use broadcasts, when we know that broadcasts can result in the system grinding to a halt due to windows that have stopped processing messages?
June 24, 2005Jun 24, 200506/24/05If the window isn’t visible on the screen, then the pixels simply don’t exist.
The Windows painting model follows the principle of “Don’t save anything you can recalculate“. Consider: You have a 640×480 display in 16-color mode. That’s 150KB of video memory.
June 23, 2005Jun 23, 200506/23/05Programs that weren’t designed to handle long file names would make mistakes like taking the path to the executable and writing it into the registry, unaware that the path might contain a space that needs quoting. (Spaces—while technically legal—were extremely rare in SFN paths.) The CreateProcess function had to decide whether to “autocorrect”
June 22, 2005Jun 22, 200506/22/05Jeremy Mazner has asked me to put together a 400-level session at this year’s PDC. I came up with the title “Five(ish) things every Win32 developer should know (but likely doesn’t)”. Of course, now I have to think of five things!
June 22, 2005Jun 22, 200506/22/05In an earlier comment, Aswin Gunawan asked why the Run dialog does autocorrection but not the Run key?
One is a programmatic interface and the other is an end-user control.
End users are not expected to be understand how computers do things.
