June 30, 2011Jun 30, 201106/30/11Another round of the semi-annual link clearance.
James Michael Hare has a very well-written blog on programming in C#/.NET, with tips, tricks, and discussion.
News flash: People at sporting events enjoy drinking alcohol.
Microsoft Excel: The Program’s Designer Reveals the Secrets Behind the Software that Changed the World 25 Years Ago.
June 30, 2011Jun 30, 201106/30/11Setting the UseUrl attribute in your App Paths key indicates that your application can accept a URL on the command line as the document to be opened. The documentation for this attribute is a confusing blend of raw documentation, guidance, history,
June 29, 2011Jun 29, 201106/29/11The integral types WPARAM, LPARAM,
and LRESULT are 32 bits wide on 32-bit systems
and 64 bits wide on 64-bit systems.
What happens when a 32-bit process sends a message to a 64-bit window
or vice versa?
There’s really only one choice when
converting a 64-bit value to a 32-bit value: Truncation.
June 28, 2011Jun 28, 201106/28/11I know two people (siblings) who are experts at those claw games. They can look at a claw game, assess the situation, decide whether there is a winnable toy, and if so, drop in their quarter and grab it. I asked the elder sibling how they arrived at this amazing skill.
June 28, 2011Jun 28, 201106/28/11A customer wanted to display the Find Printers dialog programmatically to let the user pick a printer from Active Directory and wanted to know whether this was possible.
Yes, it’s possible, and there’s more than one way to do it. There’s the lazy way and the overachieving way.
June 27, 2011Jun 27, 201106/27/11Commenter Stu suggested that instead of having code to auto-correct dialog templates, why not have a program that corrects them at build time? That way, Windows wouldn’t have to make all these accommodations for programs that didn’t understand the new dialog template requirements for property sheet pages.
June 24, 2011Jun 24, 201106/24/11A customer reported that the MessageBox function was wrapping text “at the wrong location.”
Our program displays a message with the MessageBox function, and we use the ‘\n’ character to force line breaks at positions we choose. But we’ve found that starting in Windows Vista,
June 23, 2011Jun 23, 201106/23/11I’m stealing this story from one of my colleagues.
I remember one app from a long time ago that had a feature where you could hit a global short cut key (or something like that) to launch the dictionary. It was also smart in that it would detect the current selected text and immediately search the dictionary for that term.
June 22, 2011Jun 22, 201106/22/11A customer wanted to know whether there was a way to compress files and directories (in the sense of NTFS compression) from a script or from the command line. They knew about the Properties dialog, but they wanted something scriptable.
The command-line tool for this is COMPACT.EXE.
June 21, 2011Jun 21, 201106/21/11I always forget how to do this, so I’m going to write it down so I can look it up later.
When a video is playing, right-click the volume control slider and select Enhancements, then Play speed settings. (Actually, it also works if you right-click the speaker icon,
