September 2011 | Page 3 of 3 | The Old New Thing

Why doesn't the Disk Management snap-in incorporate S.M.A.R.T. data?

Raymond ChenSeptember 8, 2011Sep 8, 201109/8/11

My article a while back on Why the Disk Management snap-in reports my volume as Healthy when the drive is dying gave the low-level explanation of why the Disk Management snap-in does not incorporate SMART information: because the Disk Management snap-in is concerned with volume partitioning. DWalker59 noted that the use of the word "Healthy...

Why is the registry a hierarchical database instead of a relational one?

Raymond ChenSeptember 7, 2011Sep 7, 201109/7/11

Commenter ton asks why the registry was defined as a hierarchical database instead of a relational database. Heck, it's not even a hierarchical database! The original registry was just a dictionary; i.e., a list of name/value pairs, accessed by name. In other words, it was a flat database. If you turned your head sideways and treated ...

What happened to that suspicious-looking guy hanging around the entrance?

Raymond ChenSeptember 6, 2011Sep 6, 201109/6/11

One of the fun parts of attending a conference is swapping stories with other professionals. Today's story is in honor of Global Security Week. (And retroactively in honor of the upcoming //build conference.) One of the attendees (let's call him Bob) shared with me a story of the time they had to make a change in one of their data centers. ...

Thanks for letting me know what my ideal career and company are

Raymond ChenSeptember 5, 2011Sep 5, 201109/5/11

When it's performance review season, all of a sudden you start getting mail about career management. What a coincidence. There are a variety of career management tools available, some mandatory, some optional. I gave one of the optional ones a shot, since it claimed to help me "manage my career and professional development", and as I already ...

What's the story with the parameters to the WM_INPUT_DEVICE_CHANGE message?

Raymond ChenSeptember 2, 2011Sep 2, 201109/2/11

A customer found these strange macros in winuser.h: According to the documentation for the WM_INPUT_DEVICE_CHANGE message, the wParam is the operation code and the lParam is a handle to the device that changed. Given that definition, the correct macro would be GET_DEVICE_CHANGE_WPARAM. What's up with the bogus GET_DEVICE_CHANGE_LPARAM ...

Invoking commands on items in the Recycle Bin

Raymond ChenSeptember 1, 2011Sep 1, 201109/1/11

Once you've found the items you want in the Recycle Bin, you may want to perform some operation on them. This brings us back to our old friend, IContextMenu. At this point, you're just snapping two blocks together. You have one block called Retrieving properties from items in the Recycle Bin and you have another block called Invoking verbs ...

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