Showing archive results for 2010

My friend :: Wendy :: got into a state where she kept misplacing her passport. (I guess she keeps moving it around.) The first time she misplaced her passport and gave up looking for it, she reported it missing and received a replacement. Then she misplaced the replacement, and while searching for it, she found the original. She repor...

As we saw some time ago, the shell animation control suffers from many limitations because its job is to be a scaled-down animation control instead of one of its more full-featured counterparts. One customer wanted to know how to load an animation into the shell animation control and then query its dimensions. Well, there is no message that revea...

On my way to work, I saw a Notice of Proposed Land Use Action. The proposed new use for the property was listed as long-term temporary parking. What the heck is long-term temporary parking?

Depends on who is setting it.

A car park in Birmingham switches from English to German in times of stress. That reminded me that over a decade ago, a colleague of mine noticed an error message on the screen at the exit to the parking garage at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The way the airport works, you pick up a ticket as you enter, and you pay your parking fee a...

It has been famously said that England and the United States are two countries separated by a common language. The same holds true for Microspeak. In the Redmond dialect of Microspeak, we talk about extensibility: Designing a system with specific points where features can be added in the future, often by outside parties. For example, an example ...

Surely by now you've seen the video where NextGenHacker101 shows you how to use the "Tracer T" program to view "how many IP's are looking at Google", their name, and connection speed (to then to then to then). (And commenter squizz explains why it "worked" in spite of the http prefix.) But more awesome is the fact that some...

For some time (I am too lazy to look up when it was introduced), the Visual Studio linker has supported a feature known as delay-loading. But why can't you use this feature to delay-load a function from ? It would be very handy: If you write the program fails to load on versions of Windows which do not support the function because the Win32 ...

A customer asked, Is there a way to turn off Full Window Drag on a single window? I have a resizable control that I would like not update itself while resizing. It so happens that I wrote a sample program ages ago to illustrate how to do this. You can find it in the Platform SDK under . The source code is also reproduced in this Knowledge ...

The Grammy Awards will be handed out this upcoming weekend, an annual award that seems to have survived. A not uncommon phenomenon at Microsoft is the annual award that winds up being awarded only once. Because all the excitement is in the announcement, not in the actual award. Every year, we want to uniquely call out and recognize a set of peopl...