The Old New Thing

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

When you transfer control across stack frames, all the frames in between need to be in on the joke

September 10, 2012 Sep 10, 2012 09/10/12
Raymond Chen
Chris Hill suggests discussing the use of structured exception handling as it relates to the window manager, and specifically the implications for applications which raise exceptions from a callback. If you plan on raising an exception and handling it in a function higher up the stack, all the stack frames in between need to be be in on ...
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The case of the asynchronous copy and delete

September 7, 2012 Sep 7, 2012 09/7/12
Raymond Chen
A customer reported some strange behavior in the Copy­File and Delete­File functions. They were able to reduce the problem to a simple test program, which went like this (pseudocode): // assume "a" is a large file, say, 1MB. while (true) { // Try twice to copy the file if (!CopyFile("a", "b", FALSE)) { Sleep(1000); if (!...

You can't rule out a total breakdown of normal functioning, because a total breakdown of normal functioning could manifest itself as anything

September 6, 2012 Sep 6, 2012 09/6/12
Raymond Chen
A customer was attempting to study a problem that their analysis traced back to the malloc function returning NULL. Is it a valid conclusion that there is no heap corruption? While heap corruption may not be the avenue of investigation you'd first pursue, you can't rule it out. In the presence of a total breakdown of normal functioning, ...
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How did the X-Mouse setting come to be?

September 5, 2012 Sep 5, 2012 09/5/12
Raymond Chen
Commenter HiTechHiTouch wants to know whether the "X-Mouse" feature went through the "every request starts at −100 points filter", and if so, how did it manage to gain 99 points? The X-Mouse feature is ancient and long predates the "−100 points" rule. It was added back in the days when a developer could add a random rogue ...

Why don't the shortcuts I put in the CSIDL_COMMON_FAVORITES folder show up in the Favorites menu?

September 4, 2012 Sep 4, 2012 09/4/12
Raymond Chen
A customer created some shortcuts in the CSIDL_COMMON_FAVORITES folder, expecting them to appear in the Favorites menu for all users. Instead, they appeared in the Favorites menu for no users. Why isn't CSIDL_COMMON_FAVORITES working? The CSIDL_COMMON_FAVORITES value was added at the same time as the other CSIDL_COMMON_* values, and its name ...