July 29, 2011Jul 29, 201107/29/11Only an idiot would have parameter validation, and only an idiot would not have it. In an attempt to resolve this paradox, commenter Gabe suggested, “When running for your QA department, it should crash immediately; when running for your customer, it should silently keep going.”
July 28, 2011Jul 28, 201107/28/11We saw some time ago that you can’t simulate keyboard input with PostMessage. You may get away with it, depending on how the application you’re trying to fake out processes input, but since you’re just faking data, the application may discover that it’s all a ruse when they try to access information that you didn’t fake out,
July 27, 2011Jul 27, 201107/27/11Some time ago, I noted the increasing luxurification of camping, where people with more money than sense decide to go through the camping experience without building any of the character that comes with it.
But that’s not the only direction luxurification has moved.
July 27, 2011Jul 27, 201107/27/11A customer reported having problems developing the correct
p/invoke signature for the
INPUT structure.
“The code works on 32-bit machines, but on 64-bit machines,
the call to SendInput returns
ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER.”
The sample code included the lines
INPUT[] inputs = new INPUT[1];
July 26, 2011Jul 26, 201107/26/11Some time ago, I told the story of how one employee’s phone received calls intended for a local radio station’s contest line due to people dialing seven digits instead of ten and defaulting to the wrong area code.
Upon reading that story,
July 25, 2011Jul 25, 201107/25/11In a comment completely unrelated to the topic, Chris Capel asks how Wordpad manages to run when you type its name into the Run dialog even though the command prompt can’t find it? In other words, the Run dialog manages to find Wordpad even though it’s not on the PATH.
July 22, 2011Jul 22, 201107/22/11A customer wanted to know how to disable windowless control support in dialog boxes. “The customer has a CommandButton ActiveX control on his dialog box, and using GetDlgItem to get the window handle of the command button succeeded with VC 6.0, but when compiled with VC 9.0,
July 21, 2011Jul 21, 201107/21/11Many years ago, in a discussion of why you shouldn’t name your DLL “security.dll”, I dug a bit into the history behind the DLL. Here are some other useless tidbits about that file.
Originally, there were two DLLs called security.dll. One was the 32-bit version and one was the 16-bit version.
July 20, 2011Jul 20, 201107/20/11A customer asked,
“Given a hardlink name,
is it possible to get the original file name used
to create it in the first place?”
Recall that hard links create an alternate name for a file.
Once that alternate name is created,
July 19, 2011Jul 19, 201107/19/11As I noted some time ago, there’s a mailing list devoted to chatting among people who work in a particular cluster of buildings. It’s not a technical support mailing list, but people will often ask a technical question on the off chance that somebody can help,
