Showing results for April 2012 - The Old New Thing

Apr 30, 2012
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When you don't speak a language, don't sound like you speak the language

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

I appreciate the help from Christoph and Voo in refining my German. But that reminds me of a story about a friend of a friend. She was in Japan to visit some friends. Although she speaks English and Mandarin fluently, she doesn't know any Japanese, so her friends taught her how to say "Sorry, I don't speak Japanese." She managed to say this ...

Non-Computer
Apr 30, 2012
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What were the tests that WinG did to evaluate video cards?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Georg Rottensteiner was curious about the weird things that WinG performed on installation to evaluate video cards. "What did it do actually and what for?" I don't actually know, since I was not involved in the WinG project, but I remember chatting with one of the developers who was working on video card benchmarks. He says that video card ...

History
Apr 27, 2012
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A process shutdown puzzle, Episode 2

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A customer reported that their program would very sporadically crash in the function . The customer was kind enough to provide a stack trace at the point of the crash: The customer wondered, "Could the problem be that my cleanup group does not have a callback? MSDN seems to suggest that this is okay." The exception being thrown is , but that...

Code
Apr 25, 2012
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How do I prevent users from opening TIF files?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A customer had a question about their Windows XP installations. (This question was from several years ago, so the fine details aren't really relevant any more, but I'm actually telling this story for a commentary opportunity.) The customer wanted to disable all file associations for TIFF files. Their first attempt was by deleting and . ...

Tips/Support
Apr 23, 2012
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Why are programs allowed to use normal characters as hotkeys?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

alv wonders why programs are allowed to create hotkeys for normal characters. The example given is the famous AltGr modifier, equivalent to Ctrl+Alt. Programs which ignore the guidance and use Ctrl+Alt as a shortcut modifier end up stealing keys from many non-English keyboard layouts, thereby preventing users from typing things like the Euro sign...

Other
Apr 20, 2012
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What does INIT_ONCE_CTX_RESERVED_BITS mean?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Windows Vista adds the One-Time Initialization family of functions which address a common coding pattern: I want a specific chunk of code to run exactly once, even in the face of multiple calls from different threads. There are many implementations of this pattern, such as the infamous double-checked lock. The double-checked lock is very easy to...

Code
Apr 19, 2012
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Why don't I get a Caps Lock warning balloon any more?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A customer asked for help diagnosing a problem they were experiencing on Windows XP: My customer reports that on their machines, they do not get the warning balloon that appears when Caps Lock is set while you are typing into a password field. I searched for relevant KB articles but couldn't find anything related to that. Can you help? Time...

Other
Apr 18, 2012
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Why doesn't the Version tab show up for very large files?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

If you have a really large file and try to view its properties in Explorer, you may find that the Version tab doesn't appear. What's going on? The Version tab uses the family of functions to obtain version information from files. It so happens that the function works by calling and then using functions like to locate the version resource so it...

Tips/Support