Showing results for April 2009 - Page 3 of 3 - The Old New Thing

We occasionally get customers who ask, "How do I disable drag and drop?" This is an odd request, so we ask the frequent follow-up question, "What are you really trying to do?" For many of these customers, the answer goes something like this: We've found that our employees often accidentally move or copy items around on the desktop and in Explorer...

Another genre in the sporadic category of dubious security vulnerability is people who find an unusual way of accomplishing something perfectly normal but declare it a security vulnerability because they found an unusual way of doing it. Security is important to all computers users, from families at home to employees of government agencies, and ...

This is another trick along the lines of using DIB sections to perform bulk color mapping. GDI will do it for you; you just have to know how to ask. Today's mission is to take a 4bpp bitmap and compress it in BI_RLE4 format. Now, sure, there are programs out there which already do this conversion, but the lesson is in the journey, not in the dest...

One of my colleagues was a fount of ideas, some of them crazy, some of them clever, and some of them both. I think this one counts as both. To render multimedia content with DirectShow, you build a so-called filter graph. A filter graph represents a series of transformations that are applied to data as it travels through the graph. For example, b...

Commenter Frans Bouma asks, Why is the text of a treenode chopped off when you switch the font from normal to bold? It apparently is for backwards compatibility but I fail to see why this is necessary for backward compatibility... Actually, bold treeview items work just fine. Watch: Start with our scratch program and make these changes: ...

Gosh, that floppy insertion article generated a lot of comments. First, to clarify the table: The table is trying to say that if you had a Style A floppy drive, then issuing the magic series of commands would return 1 if a floppy was present, or 0 if the floppy was not present. On the other hand, if you had a Style B floppy drive, the...

One feature which Windows 95 almost had was floppy disk insertion detection. In other words, Windows 95 almost had the ability to detect when a floppy disk was present in the drive without spinning up the drive. The person responsible for Windows 95's 32-bit floppy driver studied the floppy drive hardware specification and spotted ...

Tim Sneath reminds us that it is a long-standing tradition Microsoft tradition to prank someone's office while they are out (here's a video of Larry Osterman's tales of prankdom). When I went to see a Thunderbirds hockey game a few years back, I avoided mentioning at the time that seeing the game served a secondary purpose. I attended the game...