Showing archive results for 2010

First, the story as told by others: Now the question you're all going to ask so I may as well answer it: Why is this information kept in a file instead of being attached to the file itself (say, in an alternate stream)? If it were in an alternate stream, then it would track the file when it was moved or copied. First answer: Because alternate ...

If you search MSDN for , you'll find a few really old Knowledge Base articles that include it in a list of "class names of common Windows applications." I'm not sure why the Knowledge Base articles bothered to list those classes; there is no technical reason for applications to need to know this, and including the information merely encourages prog...

Today is Election Day in the United States. Some years ago, seventh grade students (age 12) were asked to imagine they had just been elected president and to give an address to the nation on one thing they would change. Remember, these are only the most entertaining ideas. Do not assume all student ideas are like these. And this sentence c...

A customer wanted to do one of those user-hostile things that Windows doesn't make easy to do (the sort of thing I tend to call out on this Web site). After receiving an explanation that Windows doesn't provide a way of doing what they want because it abuses the component in question and goes against user expectations, the customer countered, "Yes,...

Commenter littleguru asks, "Why does the End Now button not kill the process immediately?" When you click the End Now button, the process really does end now, but not before a brief message from our sponsor. When you kill a hung application, Windows Error Reporting steps in to record the state of the hung application so it can be submitted to the...

Bill Littlefield of NPR's sports program Only a Game interviews Susan Warren about competitive pumpkin-growing. [Direct link - Real format] An excerpt from her book Backyard Giants was printed in The Wall Street Journal: The Race to Break the Squash Barrier, the quest to grow a one-ton pumpkin. I'm fascinated by these subcultures of people ob...

Prerequisite: Understanding what means. I was asked to help diagnose an issue in which a program managed to stumble into the function. The stack at the point of failure looked like this: The line at that called the mystic was a simple : From what we know of , this means that somebody called into a virtual method on a derived class ...

If you work with owner-data listviews, you take the responsibility for managing the data associated with each item in the list view. The list view control itself only knows how many items there are; when it needs information about an item, it asks you for it. It's the fancy name for a "virtual list view" control. When you use an ownerdata list vi...

A customer wanted to know if there was a way for their application to invoke the Aero Peek feature so that their window appeared and all the other windows on the system turned transparent. No, there is no such programmatic interface exposed. Aero Peek is a feature for the user to invoke, not a feature for applications to invoke so they can draw a...

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