The Old New Thing

Swamping the thread pool with work faster than it can drain

June 3, 2011 Jun 3, 2011 06/3/11

Raymond Chen

This scenarios is real, but details have been changed to protect the guilty. Consider a window showing the top of a multi-page document. The developers found that when the user clicks the down-arrow button on the scroll bar, the program locks up for 45 seconds, over a dozen threads are created, and then suddenly everything clears up and the...

How do I control X-Mouse settings (active window tracking)?

June 2, 2011 Jun 2, 2011 06/2/11

Raymond Chen

For quite some time, Windows has had a setting officially called active window tracking but which informally goes by the name X-Mouse, because that was the name of the PowerToy which first exposed the feature. (The PowerToy was in turn so-named because it made the mouse behave in a manner similar to many X window managers.) The setting is ...

How do I prevent users from pinning my program to the taskbar?

June 1, 2011 Jun 1, 2011 06/1/11

Raymond Chen

A customer wanted to prevent users from pinning their application to the taskbar. I have an application that is launched as a helper by a main application. Users shouldn't be launching it directly, but rather should be launching the main application. But since the helper shows up in the taskbar, users may be tempted to right-click on the ...