October 2012 | The Old New Thing

The TEMP directory is like a public hot tub whose water hasn't been changed in over a year

Raymond ChenOctober 31, 2012Oct 31, 201210/31/12

A customer reported that they couldn't install product X. When they ran the installer, the got the error message The application was unable to start correctly (0xc00000ba). Click OK to close the application. OK The product X setup team weren't sure what to make of this, and they

The wisdom of seve^H^H^H^Hsixth graders: Living without electronics for a week

Raymond ChenOctober 30, 2012Oct 30, 201210/30/12

Sixth grade students (ages 11 to 12, roughly) were instructed to imagine that they have no television, computer, or telephone for a week and write an essay (in the form of a letter to their parents) on what they would do with their time and why. The assignment was given under standardized test conditions: 90 minutes with nothing but pencil and

Keyboard shortcut for resizing all columns in a listview control to fit

Raymond ChenOctober 30, 2012Oct 30, 201210/30/12

The keyboard shortcut for resizing all columns in a report-mode (also known as Details mode) list view control to fit the current content width is Ctrl+Num+. That's the + key on the numeric keypad. (If you're using Explorer, you can also right-click the column header and choose Size All Columns to Fit.) Note that this command is a verb, not

In the conversion to 64-bit Windows, why were some parameters not upgraded to SIZE_T?

Raymond ChenOctober 29, 2012Oct 29, 201210/29/12

James wonders why many functions kept DWORD for parameter lengths instead of upgrading to SIZE_T or DWORD_PTR. When updating the interfaces for 64-bit Windows, there were a few guiding principles. Here are two of them. Don't change an interface unless you really need to. Do you really need to? Changing an interface causes all sorts of

Whether the Unicode Bidi algorithm is intuitive depends on your definition of "intuitive"

Raymond ChenOctober 26, 2012Oct 26, 201210/26/12

In Windows, we spend a good amount of time with the pseudo-mirrored build. And one of the things that you notice is that pseudo-mirrored text comes out looking really weird. For example, the string really? (yup). comes out pseudo-mirrored as .(really? (yup. Just for fun, here's here's how your browser renders it: really? (yup). Even stra

Keyboard layouts aren't like Beetlejuice – they won't appear just because you say their name

Raymond ChenOctober 25, 2012Oct 25, 201210/25/12

A customer reported a bug in Windows Vista Home Editions: We are handling a Ctrl+V keyboard event and want to interpret it in the context of a US-English keyboard. On Windows XP and versions of Windows Vista other than Home editions, the three calls all succeed, whereas on Windows Vista Home Editions, the calls fail. On the other h

You can't use the WM_USER message in a dialog box

Raymond ChenOctober 24, 2012Oct 24, 201210/24/12

Today, I'm not actually going to say anything new. I'm just going to collate information I've already written under a better title to improve search engine optimization. A customer reported that they did the following but found that it didn't work: "I send the MDM_SETITEMCOUNT message to my dialog, but the value doesn't stick.

Diversion: Generating a random color from JavaScript

Raymond ChenOctober 23, 2012Oct 23, 201210/23/12

A colleague posed a little puzzle for a fun little app he was writing in HTML: He wanted to generate a random color. If you search around the intertubes, you can find several possible attempts at a solution, like this collection, and an interesting example that has trouble with the pigeonhole principle. The original function to generate

How do you come up with new shortcut keys?

Raymond ChenOctober 22, 2012Oct 22, 201210/22/12

Anon asks, "How do you come up with new shortcut keys and how do you deal with different keyboard layouts? What is the process; is there a company-wide procedure to keep things consistent?" This is several questions (none of them really a suggestion, but I've given up on making the Suggestion Box about suggestions; now it's just the "Ask Raym

Using WM_COPYDATA to marshal message parameters since the window manager otherwise doesn't know how

Raymond ChenOctober 19, 2012Oct 19, 201210/19/12

Miral asks for the recommended way of passing messages across processes if they require custom marshaling. There is no one recommended way of doing the custom marshaling, although some are hackier than others. Probably the most architecturally beautiful way of doing it is to use a mechanism that does perform automatic marshaling, like COM

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