Showing results for February 2013 - The Old New Thing

Feb 28, 2013
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What does 1#J mean? A strange corner case of the printing of special values

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

As a puzzle, commenter nobugz asks, "What kind of infinity is 1.#J?" double z = 0; printf("%.2f", 1/z); Now, the division by zero results in IEEE positive infinity, would would normally be printed as 1#INF. But the catch here is that the print format says "Display at most two places after the decimal point." But where is the decimal point in i...

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Feb 28, 2013
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Is there a way to specify an icon to appear next to a menu item via the resource template?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The structure lets you specify a bitmap to appear next to the menu item. Is there a way to do this from a menu resource template? No. If you look at the format of menu templates, you'll see that there is nowhere to specify a bitmap. Which kind of makes sense, because it is the responsibility of the application to destroy the bitmap refer...

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Feb 27, 2013
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When the option becomes so second-nature you forget that it’s an option

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A user of the imaginary Program Q program wanted to write an automated test that created a table, then ran various sub-test which communicated among each other by updating that table. When my test tries to create a table, the program asks the following question: q install server -r testdb Setting up this machine to be a registered tabl...

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Feb 26, 2013
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This code would be a lot faster if it weren’t for the synchronization

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

This is a story from a friend of a friend, which makes it probably untrue, but I still like the story. One of my colleagues jokingly suggested that we could speed up our code by adding these lines to our project #define EnterCriticalSection(p) ((void)0) #define LeaveCriticalSection(p) ((void)0) I replied, "You think you're joking, but you're...

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Feb 25, 2013
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Dreaming up strange inventions: The combination urinal/bidet/washing machine

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

I dreamed that a friend of mine was showing me her new appliance: A combination urinal/bidet/washing machine. As we loaded clothes into it, she said, "You okay in there, Stephanie?" A muffled voice emerged from within: "Just let me know when you're ready."

Non-ComputerDream
Feb 22, 2013
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Now that version 4 of the .NET Framework supports in-process side-by-side runtimes, is it now okay to write shell extensions in managed code?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Many years ago, I wrote, "Do not write in-process shell extensions in managed code." Since I originally wrote that article, version 4 of the .NET Framework was released, and one of the features of that version is that it supports in-process side-by-side runtimes. Does that mean that it's now okay to write shell extensions in managed code? The ans...

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Feb 22, 2013
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Isn’t the CompletionKey parameter to CreateIoCompletionPort superfluous?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

When you associate a file handle with an I/O completion port with the function, you can pass an arbitrary pointer-sized integer called the which will be returned by the function for every I/O that completes against that file handle. But isn't that parameter superfluous? If somebody wanted to associated additional data with a file handle, they...

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Feb 21, 2013
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What does -1.#IND mean?: A survey of how the Visual C runtime library prints special floating point values

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

As every computer scientist knows, the IEEE floating point format reserves a number of representations for infinity and non-numeric values (collectively known as NaN, short for not a number). If you try to print one of these special values with the Visual C runtime library, you will get a corresponding special result: Positive and negative inf...

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Feb 20, 2013
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You can ask the compiler to answer your calling convention questions

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

If you want to figure out some quirks of a calling convention, you can always ask the compiler to do it for you, on the not unreasonable assumption that the compiler understands calling conventions. "When a __stdcall function returns a large structure by value, there is a hidden first parameter that specifies the address the return value should ...

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