The TEMP directory is like a public hot tub whose water hasn't been changed in over a year
October 31, 2012Oct 31, 201210/31/12All sorts of germs.
October 31, 2012Oct 31, 201210/31/12October 31, 2012Oct 31, 201210/31/12The wisdom of seve^H^H^H^Hsixth graders: Living without electronics for a week
October 30, 2012Oct 30, 201210/30/12Sixth 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.
Keyboard shortcut for resizing all columns in a listview control to fit
October 30, 2012Oct 30, 201210/30/12The 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,
In the conversion to 64-bit Windows, why were some parameters not upgraded to SIZE_T?
October 29, 2012Oct 29, 201210/29/12James 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.
Whether the Unicode Bidi algorithm is intuitive depends on your definition of "intuitive"
October 26, 2012Oct 26, 201210/26/12In 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?
Keyboard layouts aren't like Beetlejuice – they won't appear just because you say their name
October 25, 2012Oct 25, 201210/25/12A 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.
// This keyState represents no keys pressed except for Ctrl
BYTE keyState[256] = {0};
You can't use the WM_USER message in a dialog box
October 24, 2012Oct 24, 201210/24/12Today, 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:
#define MDM_SETITEMCOUNT WM_USER
INT_PTR CALLBACK MyDlgProc(HWND hdlg,
Diversion: Generating a random color from JavaScript
October 23, 2012Oct 23, 201210/23/12A 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,
How do you come up with new shortcut keys?
October 22, 2012Oct 22, 201210/22/12Anon 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,
Using WM_COPYDATA to marshal message parameters since the window manager otherwise doesn't know how
October 19, 2012Oct 19, 201210/19/12Miral 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,