Showing archive results for 2012

Public Service Announcement: Daylight Saving Time ends in most parts of the United States this weekend. Other parts of the world may change on a different day from the United States. The NLS functions in Win32 provide functions to convert a into a string, but it does not provide any functions to perform the reverse conversion. Here are few t...

A customer was reporting a problem when they used the function to simulate a drag/drop operation for automated testing purposes. I see the mouse move from one location to another, and the starting and stopping locations are correct on the screen, but the mouse moves instantaneously rather than waiting 500ms between operations. Here's how I'm s...

All sorts of germs.

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 pape...

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 a st...

James wonders why many functions kept for parameter lengths instead of upgrading to or . 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 problems when porting. Fo...

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 stranger,...

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 hand, ...

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 message to my dialog, but the value doesn't stick. At random times, the value rese...

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 a ra...