Showing results for December 2010 - The Old New Thing

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

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 o...

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 the...

A customer reported the following strange problem: I tried to copy some text files from my computer to another computer on the network. After the copy completes, I looked at the network directory and found that while it did contain files with the same names as the ones I copied, they have completely wrong timestamps. Curious, I opened up the file...

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...

Because it's a menu, not a dialog box.

Some suggestions for those companies which produce children's play furniture:

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 ...

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 ...

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 appli...