Showing archive results for 2011

A customer admitted that they had a bug in their code: One bug in the above code is in the final parameter passed to : It's supposed to be the count in bytes, but the calculation appends only one byte for the terminating null instead of a full . In other words, it should be For concreteness, let's say the original string was five s in length,...

Here's a little trick. Open your Start menu and type scrensaver into the search box. That's right, spell it with only one e. Hey, it still found the Control Panel options for managing your screen saver. If you enable Improve my search results by using online Help in Windows Help and Support, this sends your search query to a back-end server to se...

Commenter Vilx- wondered why animated GIFs weren't used as the animation format for the shell animation common control. After all, "they are even more lightweight than AVIs." Animated GIFs are certainly more lightweight than general AVIs, since AVI is just a container format, so decoding a general AVI means decoding any encoding format invented n...

A customer asked a question, but as is often the case, the question was much more telling than the answer. We have an Internet Explorer plug-in which calls to force Internet Explorer to exit. We found that when we do this, our plug-in does not receive a notification. What could be preventing our plug-in from receiving the notification? As w...

A customer asked for help installing a particular DLL. They ran the command but got the error "SomeDll.dll was loaded, but the DllInstall entry point was not found. This file can not be registered." A DLL needs to be specifically written to be used with the command. You can't just grab some random DLL and expect to work. As we saw last week, t...

A customer asked the rather suspicious question, "How do I check whether a pointer is valid in another process?" This question should make your head boggle with bewilderment. First of all, we've moved beyond to . Second of all, what the heck are you doing with a pointer in another process? You can't do anything with it! After some back-and-fort...

Fontography is like wine. The connoisseurs speak in a language that only superficially resembles English. Here's a list of words. Which of them are terms used in fontography, and which are just pretentious blather? If you aren't familiar with font speak, here's a sample I stole from an old article on the evolution of the Internet explorer logo...

Various types of shell extensions such as thumbnail extractors are run in a separate process, and if one of those shell extensions crashes, it takes out the COM Surrogate rather than the main Explorer process. Anonymous wondered if this model could be extended to all types of shell extensions, perhaps not all at once, but gradually. The dangers...

Similar to Mike, I was able to scream (not whistle: scream) a 300 baud carrier tone. This skill proved useful when I was in college and the mainframe system was down. Instead of sitting around waiting for the system to come back, I just went about my regular business around campus. Every so often, I would go to a nearby campus phone (like a free p...

A customer pointed out that you can use to register a DLL or to unregister it, but how do you query whether a DLL has been registered? DLL registration (via ) is not declarative; it is procedural. A DLL does not provide a manifest of things it would like to happen when installed. Instead, the DLL merely provides two functions for to call, one fo...