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October 29, 2010Oct 29, 201010/29/10Bill Littlefield of NPR’s sports program Only a Game interviews Susan Warren about competitive pumpkin-growing. [Direct link – Real format] An excerpt from her book Backyard Giants was printed in The Wall Street Journal: The Race to Break the Squash Barrier,
October 29, 2010Oct 29, 201010/29/10Prerequisite:
Understanding what __purecall means.
I was asked to help diagnose an issue in which a program managed to stumble
into the __purecall function.
XYZ!_purecall:
00a14509 a100000000 mov eax,dword ptr ds:[00000000h] ds:0023:00000000=????????
The stack at the point of failure looked like this:
XYZ!_purecall
XYZ!CViewFrame::SetFrame+0x14d
XYZ!CViewFrame::SetPresentation+0x355
XYZ!CViewFrame::BeginView+0x1fe
The line at XYZ!CViewFrame::SetFrame that
called the mystic __purecall was a simple AddRef:
pSomething->AddRef();
October 28, 2010Oct 28, 201010/28/10If you work with owner-data listviews, you take the responsibility for managing the data associated with each item in the list view. The list view control itself only knows how many items there are; when it needs information about an item,
October 27, 2010Oct 27, 201010/27/10A customer wanted to know if there was a way for their application to invoke the Aero Peek feature so that their window appeared and all the other windows on the system turned transparent.
No, there is no such programmatic interface exposed.
October 26, 2010Oct 26, 201010/26/10Many years ago, Microsoft produced a collection of interactive toys called ActiMates, and one of the features was that television programs could broadcast an encoded signal which would enable the toy to interact with the program. The idea would be that the Barney doll would do something that was coordinated with what was happening on Barney &
October 25, 2010Oct 25, 201010/25/10On Friday, the marketing folks informed me that they
decided to put me on
the Microsoft Careers United States home page
in recognition of
Windows 7’s first birthday.
It’s an honor and to be honest a bit scary to be chosen
to be the face of Windows on a day of such significance.
October 25, 2010Oct 25, 201010/25/10Consider this code fragment:
void foo()
{
while (true) {
bar();
baz();
}
}
When foo calls bar(),
and bar has not yet returned, does foo
continue executing?
Does baz get called before bar returns?
No, it does not.
The basic structure of the C/C++ language imposes sequential execution.
October 22, 2010Oct 22, 201010/22/10We finish our tour of the evolution of the ICO file format with the introduction of PNG-compressed images in Windows Vista.
The natural way of introducing PNG support for icon images would be to allow the biCompression field of the BITMAPINFOHEADER to take the value BI_PNG,
October 21, 2010Oct 21, 201010/21/10Windows XP introduced the ability to provide icon images which contain an 8-bit alpha channel. Up until this point, you had only a 1-bit alpha channel, represented by a mask.
The representation of an alpha-blended image in your ICO file is pretty straightforward.
October 20, 2010Oct 20, 201010/20/10Given a HICON or a HCURSOR,
how do you get the dimensions of the icon or cursor?
The GetIconInfo function gets you most of the way there,
returning you an ICONINFO structure which gives you
the mask and color bitmaps (and the hotspot,
