December 2010

How do I limit the size of the preview window used by Aero Snap?

Raymond Chen December 10, 2010 Dec 10, 2010 12/10/10

A customer reported that the translucent preview shows by Aero Snap showed the wrong dimensions for their application window. "As you can see in the screen shot, the preview is too wide. Our application window has a maximum width, but the preview is fully half the width of the screen. How can we disable the Aero Snap feature?" Whoa there, ...

What appears superficially to be a line is actually just a one-dimensional mob

Raymond Chen December 9, 2010 Dec 9, 2010 12/9/10

In China, queueing is honored more in the breach than in the observance. If you see a line for something, you must understand that what you are seeing is not really a line. It is a one-dimensional mob. You must be prepared to defend your position in line fiercely, because any sign of weakness will be pounced upon, and the next thing you know, ...

We've traced the call and it's coming from inside the house: Grid lines in list view report mode

Raymond Chen December 9, 2010 Dec 9, 2010 12/9/10

A customer wanted to know how to remove the grid lines from a list view control in report mode. The customer was kind enough to include the source code for the relevant part of the program and drew our attention to the line in the resource file that he believed to be the source of the problem: The customer didn't know it, but that line in ...

Kindergarten writing exercise from my niece

Raymond Chen December 8, 2010 Dec 8, 2010 12/8/10

When my niece was in kindergarten, a regular classroom assignment was for students to write a few sentences about something happening in their lives. For one of the assignments, my niece wrote the following: My auntie has a baby in her tumy. If it is a boy I will call him Kevin. If it is a grl I will call her Alula. We have no idea where ...

It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway: Invalid parameters from one security level crashing code at the same security level

Raymond Chen December 8, 2010 Dec 8, 2010 12/8/10

In the category of dubious security vulnerability, I submit the following (paraphrased) report: I have discovered that if you call the XYZ function (whose first parameter is supposed to be a pointer to a IUnknown), and instead of passing a valid COM object pointer, you pass a pointer to a random hunk of data, you can trigger an access ...

Creative naming in pursuit of subverting the no-fun zone

Raymond Chen December 7, 2010 Dec 7, 2010 12/7/10

For a time, the Information Technology department at Microsoft cracked down on what it believed to be frivolous mailing lists. All mailing lists inside the company had to have a valid business purpose. The nascent wireless networking team found a way to circumvent this rule: They created a mailing list for discussion of non-business topics ...

TrackMouseEvent tracks mouse events in your window, but only if the events belong to your window

Raymond Chen December 6, 2010 Dec 6, 2010 12/6/10

Greg Williams wonders why TrackMouseEvent fails to detect mouse hover events when responding to DoDragDrop callbacks. "My suspicion is that DoDragDrop monopolizes the window so that a WM_MOUSEHOVER message is never posted, so it won't end up being useful." That's basically it, for the appropriate sense of the ...

ZOMG! This program is using 100% CPU!1! Think of the puppies!!11!!1!1!eleven

Raymond Chen December 3, 2010 Dec 3, 2010 12/3/10

For some reason, people treat a program consuming 100% CPU as if it were unrepentantly running around kicking defenseless (and cute) puppies. Calm down already. I get the impression that people view the CPU usage column in Task Manager not as a diagnostic tool but as a way of counting how many puppies a program kicks per second. While a ...

The alignment declaration specifier is in bytes, not bits

Raymond Chen December 2, 2010 Dec 2, 2010 12/2/10

Explicit object alignment is not something most people worry about when writing code, which means that when you decide to worry about it, you may be a bit rusty on how the declarations work. (After all, if it's something you worried about all the time, then you wouldn't have trouble remembering how to do it!) I was looking at some customer ...

I will be speaking at TechEd China 2010 today

Raymond Chen December 1, 2010 Dec 1, 2010 12/1/10

As I've mentioned a few times by now, the way to get me to show up at your event is to invite me. The easiest (i.e. cheapest) way is to hold your event in the Seattle area so that my travel expenses are effectively zero; I just use my bus pass. The folks at TechEd China 2010, on the other hand, had to fly me all the way out to Beijing, which ...

The Old New Thing

December 2010 - Page 3 of 4 - The Old New Thing