Showing results for August 2012 - The Old New Thing

A customer encountered the following problem: The function converts the cookie back to a object, and then checks if the object is a object by calling . If so, then it does some more stuff to figure out what type of paint to buy. (Note to nitpickers: The actual scenario was not like this, but I presented it this way to illustrate the point....

Some time ago, I described what is for: It's to detect the cases where you call a virtual method with no implementation (a so-called pure virtual method). This can happen during object constructor or destruction, since those are times when you can validly have a partially-implemented object. Well, there's another case this can happen: If the obj...

Here's a walkthrough of an actual case of psychic debugging. I'm using the internal XYZ table-generating tool, but it appears to be useless in my case. Does this tool work? Right now, I'm just resorting to the manual method of generating my data table (Chinese and English). Hooray for vague questions! "It appears to be useless." But there were ...

A customer asked if there was a command-line tool for managing Windows 7 Libraries so that they could create and deploy libraries across their organization. Not only is there such a tool, it even comes with source code. The Shell Library Command Line Sample shows how to manage Windows 7 libraries programmatically via the interface....

There is a field next to the Microsoft building I used to work in, and for a time, people parked their cars out on the field, presumably because finding a proper parking space in the garage became difficult due to overcrowding. To prevent people from parking in the field, Security placed a large log across the access to the field. The technique wor...

Some jump lists show Recent documents, and others show Frequent documents. (Images stolen from Sasha Goldshtein.) Our friend xpclient wanted to know how the taskbar decides which one to use, because it seemed random. (Ironically, xpclient is asking a question about the Window 7 client.) The default is to show Recent documents. But an appl...

I was doing some crash dump debugging, as I am often called upon to do, and one of the data structure I had to grovel through was something that operated basically like an atom table, so that's what I'll call it. Like an atom table, it manages a collection of strings. You can add a string to the table (getting a unique value back, which we will ca...

A customer reported that they were having trouble creating slim reader/writer locks at runtime. They simplified the issue to a short program: "What is the correct way of creating an via the operator?" It wasn't long before somebody noted that nowhere in the code is the function called. "Oh, yeah, thanks for catching that. It looks like ...

A customer liaison asked the following question on behalf of his customer. When I do a shift-right-click on a shortcut to a program, I see the following: The option to run a program as another user (other than Administrator) was present in Windows XP, but it was lost in Windows Vista. It appears that we responded to those complaints...

Some time ago, I was on the phone when the connection suddenly cut out. I looked at the my phone display and it said, Auto-restart in 7 seconds. The seconds counted down, and then the phone rebooted, and after about ten more seconds, it was back in business, acting like nothing was wrong. (Except that it just terminated a phone call without warning...