Showing archive results for 2008

Many of the normal interlocked operations come with variants called InterlockedXxxAcquire and InterlockedXxxRelease. What do the terms Acquire and Release mean here? They have to do with the memory model and how aggressively the CPU can reorder operations around it. An operation with acquire semantics is one which does not permit subsequent me...

After I noted how the window manager uses the double-click time as a basis for determining how good your reflexes are, people got all excited about reducing the double-click speed to make Windows feel peppier. But be careful not to go overboard. Back in the Windows 95 days, we got a bug from a beta tester that went roughly like this: T...

Today is the first day of the controversial redesigned United States citizenship examination. For the next year, candidates who applied before today can choose whether they want to use the old test or the new one. To help prepare for the new examination, I propose the following warm-up, which I tested (with the assistance of another United Stat...

If you have translucent title bars enabled,¹ you may have noticed that the translucency goes away when you maximize a window. Why is that? This is a performance optimization. Opaque title bars are more efficient than translucent ones, and when you maximize a window, you're saying,² "I want to focus entirely on this window and no othe...

It's that time again: Sending some link love to my colleagues. [Raymond is currently away; this message was pre-recorded.]

Several years ago, the Microsoft cafeterias phased out their prepaid lunch voucher system. Under the new system, you "load up" your security badge with money (either by paying cash at any register or by having the amount deducted from your paycheck) and then swipe your badge at card readers installed at each register. But in the old days, the syst...

My colleague Mario Hewart just let me know that he and Daniel Pravat will be presenting at the PDC pre-con. In case you don't recognize the names, they're the authors of Advanced Windows Debugging, a book which I reviewed late last year. So if you want to get your debugging tips directly from the source, you know where to go. Besides, Mario s...

Each component that uses ACLs to control access has its own idea of what GENERIC_READ, GENERIC_WRITE, and GENERIC_EXECUTE mean. It's not like there's a master list that somebody can make that lists them all, because I can make up a new one right here. Watch me: #define GIZMO_QUERY_STATUS 0x0001 #define GIZMO_QUERY_MEMBERS 0x0002 #define GIZM...

The command interpreter cmd.exe has a concept known as the error level, which is the exit code of the program most recently run. You can test the error level with the IF ERRORLEVEL command: IF ERRORLEVEL 1 ECHO error level is 1 or more <sidebar> The IF ERRORLEVEL n test succeeds if the error level is n or more. This was presumably becaus...

The title is mostly okay, but the description is wrong. Thanks to the power of web scripting, I can't actually link to my talk; I can just link to the main session page, and then you'll have to go searching for it. (Maybe there's a direct link but I can't find it.) The title Windows 7: Deep Dive - What's New with Win32's user32 and comctl32...