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 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 ...

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

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

Raymond Chen

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 ...

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 whose description ...

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 , 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 ...