The Old New Thing

July 2012 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

Why doesn't the Low Disk Space warning balloon show up as soon as I run low on disk space

July 17, 2012 Jul 17, 2012 07/17/12
Raymond Chen
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 ...

How much gets localized in a localized version of Windows?

July 16, 2012 Jul 16, 2012 07/16/12
Raymond Chen
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...

Why doesn't RealGetWindowClass return the real window class for my superclass?

July 13, 2012 Jul 13, 2012 07/13/12
Raymond Chen
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 ...

What happens when you mark a section as DISCARDABLE?

July 12, 2012 Jul 12, 2012 07/12/12
Raymond Chen
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 ...

What does the HTOBJECT hit-test code do?

July 11, 2012 Jul 11, 2012 07/11/12
Raymond Chen
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 (...

Microspeak: radar

July 10, 2012 Jul 10, 2012 07/10/12
Raymond Chen
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 ...

The physics of a falling Slinky

July 6, 2012 Jul 6, 2012 07/6/12
Raymond Chen
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 ...