Showing archive results for 2006

The macro lets you manipulate many of the buttons on a wizard, but the Cancel button remains elusive. Why can't you disable the Cancel button or the "X" button? Because our users tell us they don't like it. Observation of users in our labs and interviews with them reveal that wizards that disable the Cancel button cause them stress and frustrati...

If you're like many people, you signed up for the PayPal class action lawsuit and got around $9 for filing a claim against the Statutory Damage Fund. My read of IRS publication 4345 says that this constitutes taxable income. Note: This is just my personal opinion. Consult with your tax advisor before taking action. As for me, I reported it. Give...

The tool helper library is sort of the black sheep of Win32. It grew out of the 16-bit TOOLHELP library, which provided services for system debugging tools to do things like take stack traces and enumerate all the memory in the system. The original incarnation of Win32 didn't incorporate it; it wasn't until Windows 95 that a 32-bit version o...

Australian comedy group Tripod performs a song that I'm sure describes none of my readers in any way whatsoever. (Courtesy of my good friend The Knitty Professor.)

The registry is a convenient place to record persistent cross-process data in a uniform and multi-thread-safe manner. It roams with the user if you store it in , and individual keys can be secured (even on systems that use FAT, which doesn't otherwise support security). But that doesn't mean that it's free. The cost of opening a key, reading a v...

In 16-bit Windows, every thread (or "task" as it was called then) had a message queue, end of story. In the transition to 32-bit Windows, this model broke down because Win32 introduced the concepts of "worker threads" and "console applications", neither of which had much need for messaging. Creating a queue for every thread in the system would have...

Michael Cassini used forged documents to pretend that he was a Microsoft millionaire and managed to con people out of over $4.5 million before he was finally caught. Cassini claimed a net worth of $12.3 million, an annual income of $700,000; $8 million on account at Barclays Bank, and more. It was all right there on paper. And it w...

One of the consequences of studying another language for me is that I develop some sort of mental connection with the people who speak that language, despite having no innate cultural basis for it. When I studied German, I found myself cheering for the German athletes in the Olympic Games. And in the men's 4x10,000 cross-country relay yesterday, I...

Sometimes, people discover that a long-running task runs faster if you hold down the mouse. How can that be? This strange state of affairs typically results when a program is spending too much time updating its progress status and not enough time actually doing work. (In other words, the programmer messed up badly.) When you click and hold the m...

My colleague Doron Holan has started writing about kernel mode driver programming, and it looks like he's jumping in with both feet. I have to admit that I don't understand what he's saying (not being a kernel-mode person myself), but I can assure you that he knows what he's talking about. (Note that he's writing about driver programming, so if y...