Showing results for September 2011 - Page 3 of 3 - The Old New Thing

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" carr...

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 the b...

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. This pa...

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 noted,...

A customer found these strange macros in winuser.h: According to the documentation for the message, the is the operation code and the is a handle to the device that changed. Given that definition, the correct macro would be . What's up with the bogus macro? The macro was incorrectly defined in Windows Vista. In the Windows 7 ver...

Our old friend, the IContextMenu.