Showing results for 2010 - The Old New Thing

Dec 31, 2010
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2010 year-end link clearance

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Another round of the semi-annual link clearance. And, as always, the obligatory plug for my column in TechNet Magazine...

Other
Dec 31, 2010
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What makes RealGetWindowClass so much more real than GetClassName?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

There's and then there's . What makes more real? Recall from last time that the functions were added to support Windows accessibility. The goal with is to help accessibility tools identify what kind of window it is working with, even if the application did a little disguising in the form of superclassing. If you ask for the class name ...

Code
Dec 30, 2010
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WindowFromPoint, ChildWindowFromPoint, RealChildWindowFromPoint, when will it all end?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Oh wait, there's also . There are many ways of identifying the window that appears beneath a point. The documentation for each one describes how they work, but I figured I'd do a little compare/contrast to help you decide which one you want for your particular programming problem. The oldest functions are and . The primary difference between ...

Code
Dec 28, 2010
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Windows 7 not only can make a wallpaper slide show from images on your computer, it can even pull them from an RSS feed

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Buried in the theme file documentation is a section called [Slideshow] which lets you control the source for images that are used when you put the desktop wallpaper in slideshow mode. And a bonus feature hidden in the [Slideshow] section is the ability to draw the images from an RSS feed. After creating the .theme file, double-click it and it will...

Tips/Support
Dec 24, 2010
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That mysterious 01

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Some time ago, we learned the story of that mysterious J. There is another mystery character that sometimes shows up in place of a smiley face: the \001. The character starts out as the Unicode U+263A, which looks like this: ☺. In code page 437, this character lives at position 1, and depending on what program is being used ...

Other
Dec 23, 2010
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What is the correct way of temporarily changing a thread's preferred UI language?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A customer ran into a crashing bug in their shell extension. The shell extension wants to change the thread's preferred UI language temporarily, so that it can load its resources from a specific language. You'd think this would be easy: Approximately ten seconds after this code runs, Explorer crashes with the exception whose description is "A ...

Code
Dec 22, 2010
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The __fortran calling convention isn't the calling convention used by FORTRAN

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Although the Microsoft C compiler supports a calling convention called , that's just what the calling convention is called; its relationship with the FORTRAN programming language is only coincidental. The keyword is now just an old-fashioned synonym for . Various FORTRAN compilers use different calling conventions; the one I describe here ...

Code