The Old New Thing

You'd think that with the name scratch, people wouldn't expect it to be around for a long time

June 7, 2011 Jun 7, 2011 06/7/11

Raymond Chen

There is a server run by the Windows team called scratch. Its purpose is to act as a file server for storing files temporarily. For example, if you want to send somebody a crash dump, you can copy it to the scratch server and send the person a link. The file server is never backed up and is not designed to be used as a permanent solution for ...

Why do Group Policy settings require me to have a degree in philosophy?

June 6, 2011 Jun 6, 2011 06/6/11

Raymond Chen

Commenter Josh points out that Group Policy settings often employ double-negatives (and what's the difference between turning something off and not configuring it)? Group Policy settings are unusual in that they are there to modify behavior that would continue to exist without them. They aren't part of the behavior but rather a follow-on. ...

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 ...

The Old New Thing

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