Showing results for August 2013 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

I dreamed that that I was driving through a parking garage when my brakes suddenly failed. I tried executing turns to bleed off speed, but it was largely ineffective. I managed to avoid hitting a parked police car (which had arrived to investigate some other accident), but was unable to avoid another parked car. An insurance adjuster who was on th...

I had a little side project that displayed status information in a table, and I figured, hey, let me add sorting. And it was a lot easier than I thought. I just put the header row in the and the table contents in the , then I could use this code to sort the table: Each cell can have an optional custom attribute which specifies how the item sh...

Let's go straight to the question: I have two programs that take turns doing something. Right now, I manage the hand-off with two auto-reset events. In Thread A, after it finishes doing some work, it signals Event B and then immediately waits on Event A. Thread B does the converse: When its wait on Event B completes, it...

A customer wanted to know whether a shell extension can control the order of the property sheet pages in a property sheet. The interface lets you add pages and replace pages, but nothing about rearranging them. Naturally a shell extension can control the relative order of its own pages (by changing in the order in which it calls ) but how can it...

The documentation for the function mentions GCL_CB­CLS­EXTRA: Sets the size, in bytes, of the extra memory associated with the class. Setting this value does not change the number of extra bytes already allocated. What's the point of letting the application change a value if it has no effect? The class long grants access to the v...

A customer had a complex process for setting up their computers, and the process recorded information in the registry so that applications could record their state across reboots. They then noticed that if they yanked the power cord instead of going through the normal Shutdown process, that the registry keys were not reliably updated. They were won...

I dreamed that I was visiting a scenic location near the Canadian border. A central large body of water had the mainland to the south and east. A river ran southeast, spanned by a footbridge. To the northwest was another land mass, which had gained the nickname "Alaska" even though we were nowhere near Alaska. There was a gift shop on "Alaska", and...

Say you opened a file in synchronous mode, and then you realize that you want to issue asynchronous I/O on it, too. One way to do this is to call a second time with the , but this requires you to know the file name, and the file name may not be readily available to the function that wants to do the conversion, or it may not even be valid any long...

When I was growing up, the mailman letter carrier came right to our front door. The mailbox was mounted on the front of the house right next to the front door. You could check the mail without even getting dressed; just open the door a crack and stick out your hand. Approximate distance from front door to mailbox: less than 1 foot. In the nex...

We saw some time ago that before invoking a method on an object, the CLR will generate a instruction to force a null reference exception to be raised if you are trying to invoke a method on a null reference. But why does the CLR raise a if the faulting address is almost but not quite zero? When run, this program raises a rather than an . ...