Showing archive results for 2010

Via the suggestion box, Matthew Douglass-Riley wonders about the history and fate of the What's This? button. (The same question was repeated by an anonymous coward.) The What's This? button (more formally known as the contextual help caption button) is turned on by the extended style and takes the form of a question mark. When the user clicks ...

The function lets you attach autocomplete functionality to an edit control, and there are flags that describe what sources you want the autocomplete to draw from. If you call a second time, the second set of flags replace the original flags. The flags do not accumulate. For example, if you first call , and then you later call , the result is tha...

As the Windows Server 2003 project wound down, somebody reported a serious bug that went something like this: Subject: Windows Server 2003 still refers to itself as Windows .NET Server Previous versions of Windows report the product name correctly, but Windows Server 2003 still calls itself "Windows .NET Server" instead of Windows Server 2003...

Recall that a corrupted program sometimes results in a "Program too big to fit in memory" error. In response, Dog complained that while that may have been a reasonable response back in the 1980's, in today's world, there's plenty of memory around for the MS-DOS emulator to add that extra check and return a better error code. Well yeah, but if yo...

I noted some time ago that I have taken to "blaming" Exchange when someone assumes that my reply to a thread on a distribution list implies that I have taken responsibility for resolving their problem. One of my colleagues in another group is in a similar situation with respect to a different product, and he has taken to using the same basic form...

One of my colleagues shared this valuable insight into the balance between forgiveness and permission, which he in turn learned from a high-level manager in his organization: The statement that it is better to ask for forgiveness than to obtain permission is true 90% of the time. The key to success is knowing where the other 10% is.

Because it mostly ran 16-bit applications.

Many grocery stores in the United States have a printer next to the cash register which prints out coupons customized to your purchases. If you buy the house brand of spaghetti, it might print out a coupon for a slightly more expensive brand of spaghetti. The goal with these coupons is to get you to try a fancier (and therefore more profitable) ver...

More than once, I've had a customer ask, "How do I prevent users from dragging and dropping files in Explorer?" Actually, three of them in the past year phrased it in an even more provocative way: "I want to write a program that hooks Explorer and displays a prompt before every drag/drop operation." This is one of those cases where you have to fig...

One of my colleagues moved to Granada last year, and he kindly provided me some recommendations for places to eat in Madrid. We found El Brillante easily, positioned across the street from the Atoche train station, with its back door and terrace facing the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (which mercifully goes by the nickname Museo Rein...