Showing results for February 2010 - Page 2 of 4 - The Old New Thing

One of the many gotchas of working with double-null-terminated strings is accidentally using functions on them which were designed to operate on single-null-terminated strings. Now, you do need to use those single-null-terminated strings, but you also need to know when they won't do what you want. One of the responses to my psychic detection th...

About once every two months for the past six months (I stopped checking further back), somebody reports a problem with the function. Often, they don't include very much information at all. They just say, "I call the function and it doesn't work." Here's an example: I'm hitting a problem with when using it to frob files in the gonzo directory ...

On this date ten years ago, Windows 2000 launched in San Francisco. One of my colleagues was working as a staff member at the Windows 2000 Conference and Expo in San Francisco, an event which accompanied the Windows 2000 launch event. Also working at the event was his boss's boss, and the two shared a hotel room. Their flight back ...

Pretty straightforward.

Consider this type of dubious security vulnerability: There is a buffer overflow bug in kernel driver X. To exploit it, call this function with these strange parameters. The exploit works only if you are logged on as administrator, because non-administrators will get . Yes, this is a bug, and yes it needs to be fixed, but it's not a securit...

It has been widely reported that South Carolina now requires "subversive groups" to register with the Secretary of State (and pay a $5 filing fee). Curiously, the list of organizations which must register include "an organization subject to foreign control." I wonder if this means that all consulates have to register, and that when any foreign d...

In the suggestion box, A. Skrobov asks why it's impossible to superclass , but the example that follows is not actually superclassing. When I register my own class under this atom, and leave NULL in WNDCLASS.hInstance, Windows fills it in for me. Then I have two distinct classes registered: (0,WC_DIALOG) and (hMyInstance,WC_DIALOG), and DialogB...

Living so close to the United States-Canada border means that there's a lot of friendly teasing of the many Canadians in our midst. It's a good thing Canadians as a whole seem to have a pretty good sense of humor about it. (Well, except the Quebecers. Those humorless grumps.) The final stage of the modern pentathlon is supposed to be a cross-count...

Functions like and , when asked to provide information about a symbolic link, returns information about the link itself and not the link destination. If you use the function, you can tell that you have a symbolic link because the file attributes will have the flag set, and the member will contain the special value . Okay, great, so now I know ...

I was filling out one of those online satisfaction surveys, and in the introduction, it reassured me that This survey is anonymous. The first question on the survey: Enter the support request (SR) number below. Yeah, because they'll never be able to trace the support request number back to me. (I suspect that the reason for this contradicti...