April 2013

Technically not lying, but not exactly admitting fault either

Raymond Chen April 19, 2013 Apr 19, 2013 04/19/13

I observed a spill suspiciously close to a three-year-old's play table. I asked, "How did the floor get wet?" She replied, "Water." It's not lying, but it's definitely not telling the whole story. She'll probably grow up to become a lawyer...

Why does CoCreateInstance work even though my thread never called CoInitialize? The curse of the implicit MTA

Raymond Chen April 19, 2013 Apr 19, 2013 04/19/13

While developing tests, a developer observed erratic behavior with respect to CoCreateInstance: In my test, I call CoCreateInstance and it fails with CO_E_NOTINITIALIZED. Fair enough, because my test forgot to call CoInitialize. But then I went and checked the production code: In response to a client request...

How can I figure out which user modified a file?

Raymond Chen April 18, 2013 Apr 18, 2013 04/18/13

The GetFileTime function will tell you when a file was last modified, but it won't tell you who did it. Neither will FindFirstFile, GetFileAttributes, or ReadDirectoryChangesW, or FileSystemWatcher. None of these the file system functions will tell you which user modified a file because the ...

If you don’t know what you’re going to do with the answer to a question, then there’s not much point in making others work hard to answer it

Raymond Chen April 17, 2013 Apr 17, 2013 04/17/13

A customer asked the following question: We've found that on Windows XP, when we call the XYZ function with the Awesome flag, the function fails for no apparent reason. However, it works correctly on Windows 7. Do you have any ideas about this? So far, the customer has described what they have observed, but they haven't actually ...

Dangerous setting is dangerous: This is why you shouldn’t turn off write cache buffer flushing

Raymond Chen April 16, 2013 Apr 16, 2013 04/16/13

Okay, one more time about the Write-caching policy setting. This dialog box takes various forms depending on what version of Windows you are using. Windows XP: Windows Server 2003: Windows Vista: Windows 7 and 8: Notice that the warning text gets more and more scary each time it is updated. It starts out just ...

Your tenant and your lover, in your dreams

Raymond Chen April 15, 2013 Apr 15, 2013 04/15/13

I dreamed that a friend of mind said, "Between your tenant and your lover, you should get along with at least one of them...

Using opportunistic locks to get out of the way if somebody wants the file

Raymond Chen April 15, 2013 Apr 15, 2013 04/15/13

Opportunistic locks allow you to be notified when somebody else tries to access a file you have open. This is usually done if you want to use a file provided nobody else wants it. For example, you might be a search indexer that wants to extract information from a file, but if somebody opens the file for writing, you don't want them to get ...

The phenomenon of houses with nobody living inside, for perhaps-unexpected reasons

Raymond Chen April 12, 2013 Apr 12, 2013 04/12/13

In London, some of the most expensive real estate is in neighborhoods where relatively few people actually live. According to one company's estimate, 37% of the the residences have been purchased by people who merely use them as vacation homes, visiting only for a week or two per year and leaving the building empty the remainder of the year. ...

Is it legal to have a cross-process parent/child or owner/owned window relationship?

Raymond Chen April 12, 2013 Apr 12, 2013 04/12/13

A customer liaison asked whether it was legal to use SetParent to create a parent/child relationship between windows which belong to different processes. "If I remember correctly, the documentation for SetParent used to contain a stern warning that it is not supported, but that remark does not appear to be present any more. I have a ...

The importance of having a review panel of twelve-year-old boys, episode 2

Raymond Chen April 11, 2013 Apr 11, 2013 04/11/13

Microsofties love their acronyms, but you have to remember to send every potential name through a review panel of twelve-year-old boys to identify the lurking embarrassments. When it came time in Windows 7 to come up with the names of the various subteams, two of the proposed names were Core OS eXperience and Find and Use eXperience, ...

The Old New Thing

April 2013 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing