The Old New Thing

June 2008 - Page 2 of 4 - The Old New Thing

MSDN-speak: What does it mean when a parameter contains a value?

June 18, 2008 Jun 18, 2008 06/18/08
Raymond Chen
I've seen some confusion over this, heck I've been confused by this, so I figured I'd share what I've learned. In MSDN, you may see wording like this: pdwResult [out] When the function returns, contains a pointer to a DWORD value that contains the result of the computation. What they're trying to say is that the pdwResult is a pointer to...

Microspeak: Pricing uplift

June 17, 2008 Jun 17, 2008 06/17/08
Raymond Chen
In a conference call with investors last year, investor relations general manager Colleen Healy described the effect of business editions of Windows thus: As we shared with you previously, Windows Vista business generates over five times the pricing uplift over Windows Vista Home Basic than does Windows Vista Home Premium. Also known as ...

Blinding bank robbers with kindness

June 16, 2008 Jun 16, 2008 06/16/08
Raymond Chen
Despite the friendliness of people in the Pacific Northwest (or perhaps because of it), bank robberies in the area are above the national average. But in the Seattle area they went down by nearly half in the beginning of 2007. The reason isn't known for certain, but one factor may be a new approach to thwarting bank robbers by employing "...

How do the common controls convert between ANSI and Unicode?

June 16, 2008 Jun 16, 2008 06/16/08
Raymond Chen
Commenter Chris Becke asks how the common controls convert ANSI parameters to Unicode, since the common controls are Unicode internally. Everything goes through CP_ACP, pretty much by definition. The ANSI code page is CP_ACP. That's what ACP stands for, after all. Now, there are some function families that do not use ANSI. The console ...
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Sometimes it's easier just to let the native speaker win

June 13, 2008 Jun 13, 2008 06/13/08
Raymond Chen
My entry last month about that virus that is responsible for the top six Explorer crashes prompted me to check out the blog of the Anti-Malware Engineering Team, and at the bottom of a report from Microsoft TechEd Boston is a photo of a few members of the Anti-Malware Engineering Team. I've worked with some of those people, and I had ...

Don't be helpless: You can find information, too, if you try

June 13, 2008 Jun 13, 2008 06/13/08
Raymond Chen
Here's a question that floated past my view: Anybody know if there exists a library for computing MD5 hashes from unmanaged code? MSDN has information about .NET classes, but nothing about the unmanaged side. Hm, let's see. C:\Windows SDK\Include> grep MD5 *.h wincrypt.h:#define ALG_SID_MD5 3 wincrypt.h:#define ...

Email tip: Pronouns in the subject line are in the eye of the beholder

June 12, 2008 Jun 12, 2008 06/12/08
Raymond Chen
This applies to email, but it applies even more to meetings and appointments, which are typically arranged via email or similar workflow. It may seem obvious at the time, but messages with pronouns like me or you in the subject line tend to be harder to understand when you come back to the message a little while later. I was reminded of this...

If you say that you don't care about something, you shouldn't be upset that it contains garbage

June 11, 2008 Jun 11, 2008 06/11/08
Raymond Chen
There are many situations where you pass a structure to a function, and the function fills in the structure with information you request. In some cases, the function always fills in the entire structure (example: GlobalMemoryStatus). In other cases, you tell the function which bits of information you care about, to save the function the ...
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Simply attach a piano to the end of the trebuchet

June 10, 2008 Jun 10, 2008 06/10/08
Raymond Chen
As easy as 1-2-3. What's really scary is that they are hardly the only people to have done this. An Internet search will reveal many other people who've expressed similar musical talent. Or you can build one out of an industrial robot and hurl flaming bowling balls...