Showing archive results for 2009

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...

It's that time again: Sending some link love to my colleagues. Updates: Fixed name of product Microsoft Expression (no "s"). Also, I think Arvin's blog is still up—it's just being masked by a doppelganger. Will update as information becomes available.

I was typing up a document and somehow accidentally misspelled spinlock as sinlock. I was tempted to leave it.

Via the suggestion box, Martin Filteau asks Could you explain the implementation of WM_PRINTCLIENT? It seems that even MS got it wrong in the LISTBOX control. Try to AnimateWindow a window that as a LISTBOX control as a child. The LISTBOX displays correctly if it is NOT empty. However, if it is empty... nothing is drawn. I got a similar ...

It was interesting to me reading the reactions to my adventures driving a manual transmission. People seemed to be spending a lot of time trying to convince me that if only I were to expend a bit more effort in learning the finer points of driving a manual transmission and log enough time behind the wheel, then the activity will become less taxing...

There is no way to lock the registry. Whereas you can open a file with a deny all sharing mode to prevent anyone else from opening the file, the registry has no such provision. You can't lock a registry key and prevent others from reading from or writing to it. There is an internal lock on the registry, but that's just to ensure that registry opera...

I may regret this, but here's something new: A caption contest. One of my colleagues saw this picture on a company's Web site. The original caption for this picture was something like Join our affiliate program or Score big with our affiliate program. Your mission is to come up with something funnier. Here are some ideas to get you started: D...

When you view a folder for the first time, Explorer arranges the items in a nice default pattern. And when items are added to the folder, they get added to the end. And when you delete an item from the folder... the other items auto-arrange to close the gap? But wait, if you look at the View options, the Auto-Arrange option is not set. So are we ...

Commenter Phil Quirk notes via the suggestion box, " is just a weird function. I guess it's easier to call than , but that's the only thing it seems to have going for it." Yup, that's about right. The function doesn't really do anything you couldn't already do yourself with . It's just a convenience function. And it you look at it pretty clos...

I'm a pretty good speller. If I want to show impatience, I will type very fast and make no attempt to fix the typographical errors. Here's an example: Somebody asked me what the correct name is for a particular user interface element. i don't nkow. call up the online hep and see what the ycall it. It may surprise you to know that I am not par...