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

There are a bunch of functions that allow you to manipulate the address space of other processes, like and . Of what possible legitimate use could they be? Why would one process need to go digging around inside the address space of another process, unless it was up to no good? These functions exist for debuggers. For example, when you ask the deb...

Every year, Microsoft invites its employees to fill out a poll which asks questions regarding all sorts of things. One of the things Microsoft employees are asked to evaluate is whether they think that their vice president is acting planfully. The tricky part about that question is that nobody knows exactly what the word planfully means. Merriam...

Clipboarder Gadget wants to know why the desktop is treated so special in window ordering. Specifically, when you double-click a folder icon on the desktop, and the immediately close it, why does focus not go back to the desktop? Instead it goes to some random window. Actually, it's the other way around. Focus is going to a random window specific...

Long-time observers are familiar with Contoso, the fake company name used in Microsoft samples and demonstrations. The Windows Phone folks have started running with the joke and creating their own line of Contoso-branded merchandise. (Of course, if you get the Contoso mug, you should fill it with Fourth Coffee.)

Crack open open the champagne: Batch File Week is finally over! Variations on the will let you repeat an operation on the contents of a directory, possibly even recursively if you add the option, with some basic attribute-level filtering if you add the or /a- flags. For your fancy recursive file operations, there's a tool called which iter...

It may be possible based on your location to view what NBC euphemistically calls "highlights" from the women's badminton doubles match between China's Yu Yang/Wang Xiaoli and South Korea's Jung Kyung Eun/Kim Ha Na. The serves go laughably into the net, there is barely any attempt to chase down shots, and returns go far out of bounds. If this is top...

Prepare your party hats: Batch File Week is almost over. In your batch file, you may want to exit batch file processing (say, you encountered an error and want to give up), but if you use the command, that will exit the entire command processor. Which is probably not what you intended. Batch file processing ends when execution reaches the end...

(The headline was stolen from one of my cleverer friends.) I'm taking time out of my busy vacation to draw your attention (if it hasn't been already) to the story of South Korean fencer Shin A Lam, who got screwed out of her trip to the finals of the women's individual epeé.¹ The story is heart-wrenching, and the photojournalism is mo...

We've reached Hump Day of Batch File Week. Remember, nobody actually likes batch programming. You merely tolerate it. Today, we'll find the most recently-created item in a directory. (For example, we have a server that holds our daily builds, and you might want to write a batch file that automatically installs the latest build.) There may be b...