Showing results for September 2012 - The Old New Thing

My Q1 and Q3 link clearances are traditionally for links to other Microsoft bloggers, but this time I'm going to link to a few Microsoft research papers I found interesting. Why do Nigerian scammers say they're from Nigeria? Short answer: Because it ensures that the replies come only from the most gullible people on earth. Bonus chatter:...

A customer reported a problem with the function. (Gosh, why couldn't they have reported a problem with a function with a shorter name! Now I have to type that thing over and over again.) We're having a problem with the function. We call it like this: On some but not all of our machines, our program crashes with the following call stack: ...

An acquaintance of mine remarked that he sold his bicycle in Seattle a few months ago to some guy who explained, "I'm going to ride it to South America." "Okay," my acquaintance said, probably with some degree of skepticism. But it's a real project, and they head out soon! Ride to Rio: Four riders who "share a thirst for being stupid and finding...

A customer was having trouble with their RGS file. I want to include the below line in a .rgs file: When I do this, registering of the dll fails with 80002009. Any help? If I change it to then the registration succeeds (but of course now contains a hard-coded path). A common problem people have when asking a question is assuming that th...

A customer reported a problem with the function: I have a DLL with an function and an function. The code goes like this: Under certain conditions, the function is called twice, and the function is correspondingly called twice. Under these conditions, if I run the code on a single-processor system with hyperthreading disabled, then every...

A customer wanted to know how to set Size all columns to fit as the default for all Explorer windows. (I found an MSDN forum thread on the same subject, and apparently, the inability to set Size all columns to fit as the default is "an enormous oversight and usability problem.") The confusion stems from the phrasing of the option; it's not clear ...

Clipboard Gadget wants to know why normal processes can kill elevated processes via , yet they cannot do a trivial . "Only explorer seems to be able to do so somehow." There are several questions packed into this "suggestion." (As it happens, most of the suggestions are really questions; the suggestion is "I suggest that you answer my question." ...

One of my friends bought me a souvenir one one of his trips to Germany. It is a beer mug from Bayerischer Bahnhof, a restaurant and brewery at the Leipzig Bayerischer Bahnhof. The mug carries the brewery's slogan In vollen Zügen genießen, which is a German idiom meaning "to enjoy to the fullest." Literally, "Das Leben in vollen Züg...

A colleague needed some help with manipulating s. I have some generic code to execute WMI queries and store the result as strings. Normally, does the work, but doesn't know how to convert arrays (e.g. ). And there doesn't seem to be an easy way to convert the array element-by-element because expects a pointer to an object of the underlying ty...