Showing results for July 2012 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

A customer observed that when they opened a Zip file containing an Excel spreadsheet saved as XML, the icon for the spreadsheet in the Zip folder is just a plain XML icon rather than a fancy Excel-XML icon. "Is there any way to invoke a shell icon handler on an item inside a Zip folder?" Even if there were a way, you wouldn't like it. Think about...

A customer reported an issue with the title "The notification balloon for Low Disk Space does not appear even if the free disk is very low." They provided the following steps: You read through the steps nodding, "uh huh, uh huh", and then you get to the last step and you say, "Wait a second, the subject of your report was that the balloon doesn'...

ErikF wonders, "Do the localized versions of Windows translate these weird, out of the way resources? My guess is "no", but I don't have a localized copy of Windows to look at right now." There are two questions here. The first question is "What content is in scope for localization?" The next question is, "Of everything in scope, how much of i...

A customer was reporting that the function was not reporting the base window class of their superclass. (Error checking has been elided for expository purposes.) The customer found that the assertion fails, returning a window class name of "AwesomeWindow" instead of "static". "I thought the point of RealGetWindowClass was to dig through the su...

In the flags you pass to the linker, you can specify that a section be made discardable. What does that mean? If you are a kernel-mode driver, the discardable flag means that the contents will be removed from memory after initialization is complete. This is where you put your initialization code and data. But if you're writing user-mode code, t...

Leo Davidson observes that a hit-test code is defined for , but it is not documented, and wonders what's up. The is another one of those features that never got implemented. The code does nothing and nobody uses it. It was added back in Windows 95 for reasons lost to the mists of time, but when the reason for adding it vanished (maybe a ...

The metaphoric use of the term radar is in general use. It refers to the set of things that some entity is paying attention to. (That entity being the owner of the radar.) At Microsoft, the metaphorical radar usually belongs to a specific person or group. You might forward an email exchange to a person or group with the message "Just wanted to ...

Joshua posted to the Suggestion Box, "Around the time of WinXP SP2 x86, the API hook mechanism was standardized. Why wasn't the same thing done for x64?" Who said it was standardized for x86? Hooking APIs is not supported by Windows. There may be specific interfaces that expose hooks (like to let you monitor calls to and , and to let you hook...

Professor Ted Bunn (no relation), who still gets email about a Black Holes FAQ he wrote over fifteen years ago, recently blogged about what happens when you suspend a Slinky vertically, then let go. No wait, come back. In Part the First, he provides an alternate (but equivalent) explanation for the phenomenon. Allen Downey on his wonderfull...

Some time back, I provided informal guidance regarding what types of files go into which folders. Here are the official guidelines [pdf], for those looking for something with more authority than just me blathering.