The Old New Thing

What makes RealGetWindowClass so much more real than GetClassName?

December 31, 2010 Dec 31, 2010 12/31/10

Raymond Chen

There's Get­Class­Name and then there's Real­Get­Window­Class. What makes Real­Get­Window­Class more real? Recall from last time that the Real... functions were added to support Windows accessibility. The goal with Real­Get­Window­Class is to help accessibility tools identify what kind of window ...

WindowFromPoint, ChildWindowFromPoint, RealChildWindowFromPoint, when will it all end?

December 30, 2010 Dec 30, 2010 12/30/10

Raymond Chen

Oh wait, there's also ChildWindowFromPointEx. 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 ...

Psychic debugging: When I copy a file to the clipboard and then paste it, I get an old version of the file

December 29, 2010 Dec 29, 2010 12/29/10

Raymond Chen

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...

What is the correct way of temporarily changing a thread's preferred UI language?

December 23, 2010 Dec 23, 2010 12/23/10

Raymond Chen

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 ...

The __fortran calling convention isn't the calling convention used by FORTRAN

December 22, 2010 Dec 22, 2010 12/22/10

Raymond Chen

Although the Microsoft C compiler supports a calling convention called __fortran, that's just what the calling convention is called; its relationship with the FORTRAN programming language is only coincidental. The __fortran keyword is now just an old-fashioned synonym for __stdcall. Various FORTRAN compilers use different calling ...