The Old New Thing

April 2009 - Page 3 of 3 - The Old New Thing

When people ask to disable drag and drop, they often are trying to disable accidental drag and drop

April 10, 2009 Apr 10, 2009 04/10/09
Raymond Chen
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 ...

Being able to call a function without using GetProcAddress is not a security vulnerability

April 9, 2009 Apr 9, 2009 04/9/09
Raymond Chen
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...

Let GDI do your RLE compression for you

April 8, 2009 Apr 8, 2009 04/8/09
Raymond Chen
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...
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Clap and the filter graph claps with you

April 7, 2009 Apr 7, 2009 04/7/09
Raymond Chen
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 ...

There’s nothing wrong with making bold treeview items

April 6, 2009 Apr 6, 2009 04/6/09
Raymond Chen
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 ...
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On the almost-feature of floppy insertion detection in Windows 95

April 3, 2009 Apr 3, 2009 04/3/09
Raymond Chen
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...

Office redecoration: The classic Microsoft prank

April 1, 2009 Apr 1, 2009 04/1/09
Raymond Chen
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...