The Old New Thing

August 2011 - The Old New Thing

Modernizing our simple program that retrieves information about the items in the Recycle Bin

August 31, 2011 Aug 31, 2011 08/31/11
Raymond Chen
Last time, we wrote a simple program to print various properties of the items in the Recycle Bin, and we did so in the classical style, using item ID lists and IShell­Folders. One thing you may have noticed is that a lot of functions take the combination of an IShell­Folder and a PCUITEMID_CHILD. In the shell namespace, operations on...
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How can I get information about the items in the Recycle Bin?

August 30, 2011 Aug 30, 2011 08/30/11
Raymond Chen
For some reason, a lot of people are interested in programmatic access to the contents of the Recycle Bin. They never explain why they care, so it's possible that they are looking at their problem the wrong way. For example, one reason for asking, "How do I purge an item from the Recycle Bin given a path?" is that some operation in their ...
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Why can't I use PSGUID_STORAGE like a GUID?

August 29, 2011 Aug 29, 2011 08/29/11
Raymond Chen
The stgprop.h header file defines a GUID called PSGUID_STORAGE, but a customer was having trouble using it. The strange compiler error the customer referred to is the following: "I don't see what the compiler is complaining about. The parentheses appear to be properly matched before the left brace." Remember, what you see is not ...
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Random musings on the introduction of long file names on FAT

August 26, 2011 Aug 26, 2011 08/26/11
Raymond Chen
Tom Keddie thinks that the format of long file names on FAT deserves an article. Fortunately, I don't have to write it; somebody else already did. So go read that article first. I'm just going to add some remarks and stories. Hi, welcome back. Coming up with the technique of setting Read-only, System, Hidden, and Volume attributes to hide...

Stupid command-line trick: Counting the number of lines in stdin

August 25, 2011 Aug 25, 2011 08/25/11
Raymond Chen
On unix, you can use wc -l to count the number of lines in stdin. Windows doesn't come with wc, but there's a sneaky way to count the number of lines anyway: It is a special quirk of the find command that the null string is treated as never matching. The /v flag reverses the sense of the test, so now it matches everything. And the /c flag ...

What do SizeOfStackReserve and SizeOfStackCommit mean for a DLL?

August 24, 2011 Aug 24, 2011 08/24/11
Raymond Chen
Nothing. Those fields in the IMAGE_OPTIONAL_HEADER structure are meaningful only when they appear in the EXE. The values provided in DLLs are ignored. Size­Of­Heap­Reserve and Size­Of­Heap­Commit fall into the same category. In general, flags and fields which control process settings have no effect when declared in a ...

Why doesn't the Open Files list in the Shared Folders snap-in show all my open files?

August 23, 2011 Aug 23, 2011 08/23/11
Raymond Chen
A customer wanted a way to determine which users were using specific files on their server. They fired up the Shared Folders MMC snap-in and went to the Open Files list. They found that the results were inconsistent. Some file types like .exe and .pdf did show up in the list when they were open, but other file types like .txt did not. The ...

You don't make something easier to find by hiding it even more deeply

August 22, 2011 Aug 22, 2011 08/22/11
Raymond Chen
Commenter rolfhub suggested that, to help people recover from accidentally going into Tiny Footprint Mode, the Task Manager could display a right-click context menu with an entry to return to normal mode. My initial reaction to this was Huh? Who right-clicks on nothing? Tiny Footprint Mode is itself already a bad secret hidden setting. ...