November 30, 2010Nov 30, 201011/30/10At Microsoft, the take-away is the essential message of a presentation or the conclusion that you are expected to draw from a situation. It is something you are expected to remember when the whole thing is over, a piece of information you take away with you as you leave the room.
November 29, 2010Nov 29, 201011/29/10KJK::Hyperion asks, “Could you shed some light on Get/SetMessageExtraInfo? It’s almost like nobody on earth used them, ever, and I can’t get some sample code.”
Yup, that’s about right. Nobody on earth (to within experimental error) ever used them.
These functions were introduced on July 20,
November 26, 2010Nov 26, 201011/26/10Some time ago, I spent the Thanksgiving holiday with my nieces (ages 3 and 5 at the time), and I overheard this conversation between them.
“Thanksgiving is over.”
— Christmas is coming!
“It’s Christmas time!”
— Today is Christmas!
November 26, 2010Nov 26, 201011/26/10A customer had the following question:
We have an application which copies and pastes files. Our problem is that we want to paste the files into the folder which corresponds to the currently active Windows Explorer window. Right now, we’re using SendKeys.SendWait(“^(v)”),
November 25, 2010Nov 25, 201011/25/10A customer who doesn’t read this blog had the following question:
The requirement for our application is that it must be on top of all other windows, even in the presence of other windows with the topmost style. In our WM_KILLFOCUS and WM_PAINT messages,
November 24, 2010Nov 24, 201011/24/10A customer reported an apparent inconsistency in the shell common file dialogs:
The question mark appears to be treated differently from other invalid file name characters. I tried to save a file in Paint under the name ?.jpg but instead of telling me that I had an invalid character in the file name (as it does with other characters like / <
November 23, 2010Nov 23, 201011/23/10Many many years ago, back in the days when Microsoft’s email address had exclamation points, an internal tool was developed to permit Microsoft employees to view and update their Benefits information from the comfort of their very own offices. Welcome to the paperless office!
November 22, 2010Nov 22, 201011/22/10As a prerequisite, I am going to assume that you understand how TLS works, and in particular how __declspec(thread) variables work. There’s a quite thorough treatise on the subject by Ken Johnson (better known as Skywing), who comments quite frequently on this site.
November 19, 2010Nov 19, 201011/19/10(Windows was released on November 20, 1985, twenty-five years ago tomorrow. Happy birthday!)
You have GetWindowsDirectory and you have GetSystemDirectory. Why do we need both? They’re both read-only directories. They are both searched by LoadLibrary. They seem to be redundant. (There are other directories like GetWindowsSystemDirectory which are not relevant to the discussion.)
Back in the old days,
November 18, 2010Nov 18, 201011/18/10(The strangely-phrased subject line is for search engine optimization.)
A customer reported that when they called ShellExecute, the function sometimes fails with SE_ERR_ACCESSDENIED, depending on what they are trying to execute. (If they had tried ShellExecuteEx they would have gotten the error ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED.)
After a good amount of back-and-forth examing file type registrations,
