January 31, 2011Jan 31, 201101/31/11A while ago, I mentioned that there are many applications that rely on WM_PAINT messages being delivered even if there is nothing to paint because they put business logic inside their WM_PAINT handler. As a result, Windows sends them dummy WM_PAINT messages.
January 28, 2011Jan 28, 201101/28/11If you try to run the sample program demonstrating how to create a file mapping using large pages, you’ll probably run into the error ERROR_NOT_ALL_ASSIGNED (Not all privileges or groups referenced are assigned to the caller) when calling AdjustTokenPrivileges. What is going on?
January 27, 2011Jan 27, 201101/27/11The easy one-stop-shopping
way to get the icon for a file is to use the
SHGetFileInfo
function with the SHGFI_ICON flag.
One quirk of the SHGetFileInfo function is that
if you pass the path to a shortcut file,
it will always place the shortcut overlay
on the icon,
January 26, 2011Jan 26, 201101/26/11At Microsoft, leverage is not a term of physics whereby a force can be magnified by the application of mechanical advantage. It is also not a term of finance whereby the power of a small amount of money can be magnified by the assumption of debt.
January 25, 2011Jan 25, 201101/25/11A customer liaison contacted the shell team with the following request:
Subject: Support case: 069314718055994
On two of my customer’s machines, he’s finding that if he opens %TEMP% from the Start menu, it opens C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Temp\1, C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Temp\2, and so on. Each time the user logs off and back on,
January 24, 2011Jan 24, 201101/24/11If your window doesn’t have a handler for the WM_SETREDRAW message, then DefWindowProc will give you a default implementation which suppresses WM_PAINT messages for your window when redraw is disabled, and re-enables WM_PAINT (and triggers a full repaint) when redraw is re-enabled.
January 21, 2011Jan 21, 201101/21/11Every year, I put together a little pocket guide to the Seattle Symphony subscription season for my symphony friends to help them decide which ticket package they want. As before, you might find it helpful, you might not, but either way,
January 21, 2011Jan 21, 201101/21/11Here’s a question that came from a customer.
You can answer it yourself based on what you know about modal UI.
(If you’re kind of rusty on the topic,
you can catch up here.)
I’ve left in some irrelevant details
just to make things interesting.
January 20, 2011Jan 20, 201101/20/11Historically, COM
placed a giant try/except around your server’s methods.
If your server encountered what would normally be an unhandled exception,
the giant try/except would catch it and turn it into the
error RPC_E_SERVERFAULT.
It then marked the exception as handled,
January 19, 2011Jan 19, 201101/19/11Many decisions make sense only in the context of history.
Much like the moviegoers who were puzzled why NASA didn’t just use the Space Shuttle to rescue the Apollo 13 astronauts, computer users of today, when looking back on historical decisions,
