The Old New Thing

March 2011 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

How does the C runtime know whether to use the static-linking or dynamic-linking version of the header file?

March 21, 2011 Mar 21, 2011 03/21/11
Raymond Chen
In response to a description of what happens when you get wrong, nksingh asks, "This seems like a problem for the CRT. As far as I know, VC gives you the option of statically or dynamically linking the CRT. But it seems like the headers will have to make a choice to support one thing better than the other. Conditional compilation would work...

You can extend the PROPSHEETPAGE structure with your own bonus data

March 18, 2011 Mar 18, 2011 03/18/11
Raymond Chen
... for when regular strength lParam just isn't enough. A little-known and even less-used feature of the shell property sheet is that you can hang custom data off the end of the structure, and the shell will carry it around for you. Mind you, the shell carries it around by means of and destroys it by just freeing the underlying memory, so...

What does the "l" in lstrcmp stand for?

March 17, 2011 Mar 17, 2011 03/17/11
Raymond Chen
If you ask Michael Kaplan, he'd probably say that it stands for lame. In his article, Michael presents a nice chart of the various L-functions and their sort-of counterparts. There are other L-functions not on his list, not because he missed them, but because they don't have anything to do with characters or encodings. On the other hand, ...

What’s up with the mysterious inc bp in function prologues of 16-bit code?

March 16, 2011 Mar 16, 2011 03/16/11
Raymond Chen
A little while ago, we learned about the EBP chain. The EBP chain in 32-bit code is pretty straightforward because there is only one type of function call. But in 16-bit code there are two types of function calls, the near call and the far call. A near call pushes a 16-bit return address on the stack before branching to the function entry ...

Raymond's highly scientific predictions for the 2011 NCAA men's basketball tournament

March 15, 2011 Mar 15, 2011 03/15/11
Raymond Chen
Once again, it's time for Raymond to come up with an absurd, arbitrary criterion for filling out his NCAA bracket. This year, I look at the strength of the school's football team, on the theory that a school with a strong football team and a strong basketball team has clearly invested a lot in its athletics program. My ranking of football ...

Why can't Explorer decide what size a file is?

March 15, 2011 Mar 15, 2011 03/15/11
Raymond Chen
If you open Explorer and highlight a file whose size is a few kilobytes, you can find some file sizes where the Explorer Size column shows a size different from the value shown in the Details pane. What's the deal? Why can't Explorer decide what size a file is? The two displays use different algorithms. The values in the Size column are ...

The old DEBUG program can load COM files bigger than 64KB, but that doesn't mean they actually load as a program

March 14, 2011 Mar 14, 2011 03/14/11
Raymond Chen
Some times ago, I described why a corrupted binary sometimes results in the error "Program too big to fit in memory". Commenter Neil was under the impression that nonrelocatable programs files could be larger than 64KB and used the DEBUG command to verify this assertion. While it's true that DEBUG can load files bigger than 64KB, that doesn...

Why does my TIME_ZONE_INFORMATION have the wrong DST cutover date?

March 11, 2011 Mar 11, 2011 03/11/11
Raymond Chen
Public Service Announcement: Daylight Saving Time begins in most parts of the United States this weekend. Other parts of the world may change on a different day from the United States. A customer reported that they were getting incorrect values from the function. I have a program that calls , and it looks like it's returning incorrect DST ...