Showing archive results for 2012

Some time ago, Ry Jones gave some examples of Quotable Raymond, including the following: How to make a good doc bug report: 1. Don't embed pictures. ... This isn't Highlights magazine. What Ry didn't realize is that his "..." totally misrepresented the message. There were actually two separate items, but he combined them into one and rep...

Given that you have a Win32 dialog box with static text in an control, how do you make it so that users can easily copy that text to the clipboard? The traditional solution is to create a borderless read-only edit control (which draws as static text by default). Add it to the tab order by setting the style, and maybe even give it a keyboard a...

Gabe wanted to know the nature of the feedback that resulted in the change to Explorer navigation pane. Historically, Explorer had a navigation pane that contained a folder tree, and the navigation pane could be toggled on and off. From observations and usability studies, we observed that users in general found this toggling burdensome. People li...

There's a setting for it, but you need some help from the application.

Mike Dunn was curious about the intended purpose of . The style adds a row below the header control consisting of an edit control and a funnel icon. The funnel icon presumably represents a coffee filter, because after all, everybody in the world drinks coffee as much as people in Seattle. (Developers think they're so clever.) Mike points out t...

If your application uses indirect localized string resources, and you update the application, you may find that Windows keeps using the old string from the previous version of the application. For example, suppose that you set the localized name for a shortcut to , and in version 1 of your program, you have For version 2, your marke...

The syntax for indirect localized string resources is filenamestringId, optionally followed by a semicolon and a comment. A customer wanted to know what the minus signs stands for. The minus sign doesn't "stand for" anything. It's just part of the syntax. It's like asking what the semicolon at the end of a C statement stands for. It doesn't stand...

A customer had a question, which was sort of I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature in reverse. A customer is asking if there is a way to programmatically control the icons in the notification area. Specifically, they want the setting for their notification icon to be "Only show notifications" rather than "Show icon and notifi...

If you double-click a music file, it doesn't show up in your Recent Items list. What's so special about music files? The technical reason is that the file types are registered with the flag, which means that they don't show up in the Recent Items list (formerly known as Recent Documents), and they don't show up in the Recent or Frequent section ...

Alasdair King asks why Wordpad has three formats, Text Document, Text Document - MS-DOS Format, and Unicode Text Document. "Isn't at least one redundant?" Recall that in Windows, three code pages have special status. Three text file formats. Three encodings. Hm... I wonder... As you might have guessed by now, the three text file formats c...