The Old New Thing

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

How do I invoke a verb on an IShellItemArray?

September 20, 2012 Sep 20, 2012 09/20/12
Raymond Chen
A customer wanted to invoke a command on multiple items at once.I have an IShellItemArray,and I want to invoke a verb with that array as the parameter.I know that I can invoke a verb on a single IShellItemby the code below, but how do I pass an entire array?The function Invoke­Verb­On­Iteminvokes the command by ...
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The day I stole Joe Belfiore's mouse

September 18, 2012 Sep 18, 2012 09/18/12
Raymond Chen
He's now the head demo-monkey/cheerleader for Windows Phone, but back in the old days, Joe Belfiore was the head demo-monkey/cheerleader for the Windows 95 user interface design. A team-wide meeting was held to show off the new interface that they had developed. Wow look, we have a Start menu (though it wasn't known by that name yet), a ...

How do you deal with an input stream that may or may not contain Unicode data?

September 17, 2012 Sep 17, 2012 09/17/12
Raymond Chen
Dewi Morgan reinterpreted a question from a Suggestion Box of times past as "How do you deal with an input stream that may or may not contain Unicode data?" A related question from Dave wondered how applications that use CP_ACP to store data could ensure that the data is interpreted in the same code page by the recipient. "If I send a .txt ...
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Raymond learns about some of the things people do to get banned on Xbox LIVE

September 14, 2012 Sep 14, 2012 09/14/12
Raymond Chen
I still enjoy dropping in on Why Was I Banned? every so often, but not being a l33t Xbox haxxor, I don't understand a lot of the terminology. Fortunately, some of my colleagues were kind enough to explain them to me. (And now I'm explaining them to you so that you don't have to look as stupid asking them.) A modded lobby is a pre-game lobby...

IShellFolder::BindToObject is a high-traffic method; don't do any heavy lifting

September 14, 2012 Sep 14, 2012 09/14/12
Raymond Chen
A customer observed that once the user visited their shell extension, Explorer ran really slowly. (Actually, it took a while just to get to this point, but I'll skip the early investigations because they aren't relevant to the story.) Some investigation showed that Explorer's tree view was calling into the shell extension, which was in turn ...
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WM_CTLCOLOR vs GetFileVersionInfoSize: Just because somebody else screwed up doesn't mean you're allowed to screw up too

September 13, 2012 Sep 13, 2012 09/13/12
Raymond Chen
In a discussion ofthe now-vestigial lpdwHandle parameterto the Get­File­Version­Info­Size function,Neil asks,"Weren't there sufficient API differences(e.g. WM_CTLCOLOR) between Win16 and Win32 to justifychanging the definitions to eliminate the superfluous handle?"The goal of Win32 was to provide as much backward ...

Rogue feature: Docking a folder at the edge of the screen

September 12, 2012 Sep 12, 2012 09/12/12
Raymond Chen
Starting in Windows 2000 and continuing through Windows Vista, you could drag a folder out of Explorer and slam it into the edge of the screen. When you let go, it docked itself to that edge of the screen like a toolbar. A customer noticed that this stopped working in Windows 7 and asked, "Was this feature dropped in Windows&...

Why can't I use Magnifier in Full Screen or Lens mode?

September 11, 2012 Sep 11, 2012 09/11/12
Raymond Chen
A customer liaison asked why their customer's Windows 7 machines could run Magnifier only in Docked mode. Full Screen and Lens mode were disabled. The customer liaison was unable to reproduce the problem on a physical machine, but was able to reproduce it in a virtual machine. Full Screen and Lens mode require that desktop composition ...