Showing archive results for December 2011

The function , documented as returning "the child or the parent of the window", was a joke, but there's a function whose behavior is just as confusing as the joke function : . The function returns the parent window, or owner window, or possibly neither. All that's left is for it to be a floor wax and it'll have everything covered. The idea behi...

I hadn't even noticed this until somebody pointed it out: When you hover your mouse over a button in the Windows 7 taskbar which corresponds to a running application, the taskbar button lights up in a color that matches the colors in the icon itself. (And even more subtly, the lighting effect is centered on the mouse.) This feature even has ...

A customer reported that they were having problems with their program entry in the Programs and Features folder (formerly known as Add and Remove Programs, formerly known as Add/Remove Programs). When the user goes to the Programs and Features folder, selects their program, and clicks Uninstall, the uninstaller runs, but after the uninstaller exits...

A customer reported a problem with a program that ran a series of other programs in parallel. We have a main program (call it main.exe) that runs a bunch of child processes with stdout and stderr redirected. (We are not redirecting stdin.) We've found that some of the child processes get stuck inside the C runtime startup code on a call to on the...

A customer was encountering sporadic crashes in their 64-bit application, and upon investigation, the problem was traced to a misaligned RSP register. We saw some time ago that the Windows x64 calling convention requires the RSP register to be 16-byte aligned. The customer traced the source of the misalignment to a third-party library they were ...