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May 31, 2011May 31, 201105/31/11I found it amusing that somebody considered the fact that Microsoft employees can read my queued-up blog entries before the articles are published to be further evidence of Microsoft’s evil essence as a monopoly.
Just for the record, this is not evidence of Microsoft’s evil essence as a monopoly.
May 30, 2011May 30, 201105/30/11There are a few places in Windows where you are asked to enter your name in order to set up an account. Just for fun, I went through all the localized versions I could find and extracted the sample names. Some locales did not get around to translating all the strings.
May 27, 2011May 27, 201105/27/11In Windows 2000, Explorer let you add properties like Summary and Author to nearly any file type. But when you view the files from a machine running Windows XP or later, those properties are lost. Where did they go?
Most file types do not have extensibility points for adding metadata.
May 26, 2011May 26, 201105/26/11There are three functions which test very similar things, and sometimes applications pick the wrong one. Here’s the rundown:
IsThemeActive checks whether visual styles are enabled for the user. This is not an application-specific setting; it tells you whether visual styles are enabled in general.
May 25, 2011May 25, 201105/25/11WinMain is
the conventional name for the user-provided entry point
in a Win32 program.
Just like in 16-bit Windows, where the
complicated entry point requirements were converted by language-provided
startup code into a call to the the user’s WinMain function,
the language startup code for 32-bit programs also does the work of
converting the raw entry point into something that calls
WinMain
(or wWinMain or main or _wmain).
May 24, 2011May 24, 201105/24/11The game PowerPoint-Karaoke was invented in 2006 by Zentrale Ingelligenz Agentur. In this game, contestants are called upon to give a PowerPoint presentation based on a slide deck they have never seen. (The German spelling uses a hyphen between the two words.
May 23, 2011May 23, 201105/23/11Once you make it possible to do something,
you have to accept that you also made it possible to do something wrong.
When the window manager was originally designed,
it made it possible for programs to override many standard behaviors.
They could handle the WM_NCHITTEST message
so a window can be dragged by grabbing any part of the window,
May 20, 2011May 20, 201105/20/11In a discussion of commuting options (in which I was primarily an observer), the following exchange took place:
A: I would rather get kicked in the shins every morning than bike up the massive hill that sits between my apartment and main campus.
May 20, 2011May 20, 201105/20/11I covered the BeginBufferedPaint function in
my 2008 PDC presentation,
but one thing I didn’t mention is that the buffered paint functions
are very handy even if you have no intention of painting.
Since the buffered paint functions maintain a cache
(provided that you remembed to call
BufferedPaintInit),
May 19, 2011May 19, 201105/19/11There is no standard for process exit codes. You can pass anything you want to ExitProcess, and that’s what GetExitCodeProcess will give back. The kernel does no interpretation of the value. If youw want code 42 to mean “Something infinitely improbable has occurred”
