Showing results for December 2008 - The Old New Thing

Time for the semi-annual link clearance. Finally, we have the traditional plug for my column in TechNet Magazine:

Many years ago, I was in a small meeting: It consisted of the project manager, me, and one other person. Just a quick little status meeting to discuss how things were going. We were a few minutes into the meeting when the project manager's cell phone rang. Now, this was back in the days before cell phones were ubiquitous. They were pretty spendy ga...

You've seen it, I'm sure. People walking down the street talking to themselves. Crazy or cellphone? What really gets me are the people who wear the headsets even when they aren't talking on the telephone, but rather in anticipation of receiving a telephone call. To those people, I have this to say to you: You're not that important. Get over...

Whenever I post about a programming error that can lead to crashes, the security team gets all excited and starts looking for ways to exploit it. For example, when I wrote about the fundamentally flawed flag, the security folks went scouring through the Windows source code looking for anybody who passed that flag, and then tried to come up with ...

Here's a problem inspired by actual events. When I build my project, it compiles fine, but it fails during the link step with an unresolved external: program.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "public: virtual wchar_t const * __thiscall UILibrary::PushButton::GetName(class UILibrary::StringHolder * *)" (?GetName@PushButton@UILibr...

When you visited a computer on the network by typing into the address bar, Explorer showed you a Printers folder if the computer had printer sharing enabled. But starting in Windows Vista, the Printers folder is shown regardless of whether the remote computer is sharing any printers. Why did this change? Communicating with the remote compu...

Several years ago, the security department sent out a company-wide memo: Over the next few months, we will be upgrading the card readers on all of our major campuses. The old card readers show a solid red light when the door is locked, whereas the new card readers show a blinking red light. Aw-right, a blinking light. Now we're cookin' with gas!...

A few years ago, some email was sent out to the product team asking for a volunteer hand model to demonstrate how to open the Windows Vista box. Alas, I withdrew myself from consideration due to my withered hand.

While visiting my young nieces, we sang some Christmas songs, and when it came to sing Toyland, the four-year-old sang it with misheard lyrics: "Toi-let! Toi-let!"

Here's an interesting customer question: Windows has and . It also has but no . Why isn't there a function? Am I forced to simulate it with an event? What would this imaginary function do? Recall that delivers the message directly to the window procedure; the message pump never sees it. The imaginary function would have to deliver the me...