Showing archive results for 2009

Via the suggestion box, Dominic Self asks why screen resolution is a global setting rather than a per-user setting. Well, first of all, it's not even a global setting. It's a session setting. That it's not a global setting is not readily apparent most of the time since only Windows Terminal Server is set up to support multiple simultaneous inter...

The following question came in from a customer: If our program isn't installed and users double-click our document, they get sent to a Web site that presents a list of programs, but we want to send the user directly to our download site. How do we claim a file extension for our application? Um, you don't. You cannot pre-emptively reserve a ...

I think you see where this is going. I'm at a Thai restaurant with my sister-in-law, who is Thai. She's talking with the waitress in Thai, and she discovers that the restaurant's cook is someone she knows. And since she's from Thailand, she assumes the task of ordering the food, since she knows what's good and what isn't. During their convers...

Commenter dan g. wonders how Windows can treat non-Unicode applications as Unicode via the Regional and Language Options control panel, specifically the part that lets you choose the Language for non-Unicode programs. "Having always believed that the only way to display, say, Chinese characters correctly was to compile with _UNICODE, this facility...

When the file association Web service was first being developed, the programmer responsible for implementing the feature just scrounged around and found an old unused computer and set it up as a simple Web server under his desk, so there would be something to test the code against. That server happily churned away serving out file extension inform...

In February 2007, a serious automobile accident took place in southwest Washington. A twelve-year-old boy was at the wheel of an SUV when he lost control and struck another vehicle. According to the sheriff's office, "Excessive speed appeared to be a factor in the crash." I dunno, I think a major factor is that a twelve-year-old was behind the whe...

If you double-click a file for which there is no registered handler, Windows will offer to visit the Web service on shell.windows.com to locate a program that can open it. But where does this information come from, and how can you add your program to the database? Knowledge Base article Q929149, titled Windows File Association System On-Boardin...

Last week, Web comic xkcd covered the new Windows 7 user interface. Unfortunately, they got the wrong operating system. It was Windows XP that had a picture of Hitler (according to a few of our beta testers).

Commenter bav016 asks how functions like and know which thread the messages should go to. Unlike some functions such as which have a window handle parameter that lets you say which window you want to operate on, and don't say which thread the or message should go to. How do they decide? The messages go to the current thread; that is, they...

A friend of mine told me a story of a project from over ten years ago. Part of the product design was that it would include a bunch of skins (visual styles). The development team had written up the skinning infrastructure, but the company which was hired to create the actual skins hadn't delivered anything. My friend's assignment was to test the sk...