The Old New Thing

October 2010 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

The evolution of the ICO file format, part 2: Now in color!

October 19, 2010 Oct 19, 2010 10/19/10
Raymond Chen
Last time, we looked at the format of classic monochrome icons. But if you want to include color images, too? (Note that it is legal—and for a time it was common—for a single ICO file to offer both monochrome and color icons. After all, a single ICO file can offer both 16-color and high-color images; why not also 2-color images?) The ...

The evolution of the ICO file format, part 1: Monochrome beginnings

October 18, 2010 Oct 18, 2010 10/18/10
Raymond Chen
This week is devoted to the evolution of the ICO file format. Note that the icon resource format is different from the ICO file format; I'll save that topic for another day. The ICO file begins with a fixed header: idReserved must be zero, and idType must be 1. The idCount describes how many images are included in this ICO file. An ICO ...

What does the FOF_NOCOPYSECURITYATTRIBS flag really do (or not do)?

October 15, 2010 Oct 15, 2010 10/15/10
Raymond Chen
In the old days, the shell copy engine didn't pay attention to ACLs. It just let the file system do whatever the default file system behavior was. The result was something like this: Perfectly logical, right? If a new file is created, then the security attributes are inherited from the container. If an existing file is moved, then its ...
Comments are closed.0 0
Code

The memcmp function reports the result of the comparison at the point of the first difference, but it can still read past that point

October 14, 2010 Oct 14, 2010 10/14/10
Raymond Chen
This story originally involved a more complex data structure, but that would have required too much explaining (with relatively little benefit since the data structure was not related to the moral of the story), so I'm going to retell it with double null-terminated strings as the data structure instead. Consider the following code to ...
Comments are closed.0 0
Code

How do I get the color depth of the screen?

October 13, 2010 Oct 13, 2010 10/13/10
Raymond Chen
How do I get the color depth of the screen? This question already makes an assumption that isn't always true, but we'll answer the question first, then discuss why the answer is wrong. If you have a device context for the screen, you can query the color depth with a simple arithmetic calculation: Now that you have the answer, I'll ...
Comments are closed.0 0
Code

Why does each drive have its own current directory?

October 11, 2010 Oct 11, 2010 10/11/10
Raymond Chen
Commenter Dean Earley asks, "Why is there a 'current directory' AND an current drive? Why not merge them?" Pithy answer: Originally, each drive had its own current directory, but now they don't, but it looks like they do. Okay, let's unwrap that sentence. You actually know enough to answer the question yourself; you just have to put the ...

Why does TaskDialog return immediately without showing a dialog? – Answer

October 8, 2010 Oct 8, 2010 10/8/10
Raymond Chen
Last time, I left an exercise to determine why the Task­Dialog function was not actually displaying anything. The problem had nothing to do with an invalid window handle parameter and had all to do with original window being destroyed. My psychic powers told me that the window's WM_DESTROY handler called Post­Quit­Message. As we...
Comments are closed.0 0
Code

The overlooked computer room at school that became my "office" for a while

October 7, 2010 Oct 7, 2010 10/7/10
Raymond Chen
VIMH's comment on an unmarked restroom that is largely unknown reminds me of a story from my college days. Since my final project involved computational geometry, I was granted a key to the rooms in our department which had the computers with fancy graphical displays. (The term "fancy graphical display" is a relative one, mind you. By today'...

Feedback usabilla icon