Sometimes my dreams are entirely uneventful
September 30, 2013Sep 30, 201309/30/13I dreamed that I was washing dishes with my lovely wife.
September 30, 2013Sep 30, 201309/30/13September 30, 2013Sep 30, 201309/30/13Playing a sound every time the foreground window changes
September 30, 2013Sep 30, 201309/30/13Today’s Little Program plays a little sound every time the foreground
window changes.
One of my colleagues wondered if such a program was possible,
“so that I stop accidentally typing the second halves of paragraphs
into windows that pop up and steal focus.”
2013 Q3 link clearance: Microsoft blogger edition
September 27, 2013Sep 27, 201309/27/13It’s that time again: Linking to other Microsoft bloggers, and once again, the links are all from the excellent NT Debugging blog.
Challenges of debugging optimized x64 code: A debugging walkthrough, including diagrams of the x64 calling convention.
Windows Hotfix and Updates –
How can I determine how responsive my application is to input?
September 27, 2013Sep 27, 201309/27/13A customer was adding diagnostics to their application and wanted to know if there was a way to detect that the application was being slow in processing its input. These sorts of delays manifest themselves to the end user as a sluggish application which is slow to respond to input events.
Don't forget, Unicode includes formatting characters which can be used to influence output formatting
September 26, 2013Sep 26, 201309/26/13Consider this simple function:
void Reminder(HWND hwnd)
{
MessageBoxW(nullptr,
L”Please print out this form in triplicate ”
L”and bring it to the assistance desk ”
L”on level 2.”,
L”Reminder”, MB_OK);
}
Depending on your screen resolution and font choices, this may
end up displaying like this:
Reminder
How can I tell that somebody used the MAKEINTRESOURCE macro to smuggle an integer inside a pointer?
September 25, 2013Sep 25, 201309/25/13Many functions and interfaces provide the option of passing either a string or an integer. The parameter is formally declared as a string, and if you want to pass an integer, you smuggle the integer inside a pointer by using the MAKEINTRESOURCE macro.
Punctuation is becoming increasingly decorative and less functional
September 24, 2013Sep 24, 201309/24/13The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks calls out abuse of the quotation mark. For some reason, quotation marks are being increasingly used as a form of emphasis (a usage which remains controversial), by people unaware that such use, when interpreted as scare quotes,
Wait, so does moving a file recalculate inherited permissions or doesn't it?
September 24, 2013Sep 24, 201309/24/13A customer had a question about whether moving a file recalculated inherited permissions. They found that on their Windows Server 2008 R2 machine, if they moved a file between directories with different inheritable ACEs, then the security descriptor is recalculated to match the destination folder,
I dreamed that I was in an alternate-universe Samuel L. Jackson movie
September 23, 2013Sep 23, 201309/23/13I dreamed that I was part of the crew of an underwater spaceship, and we had to deal with an alligator that got on board. How the alligator got on board was never explained, but now is not the time to ask questions because,
Providing a custom autocomplete source for an edit control
September 23, 2013Sep 23, 201309/23/13Today’s Little Program shows a custom source for autocomplete.
It’s nothing exciting, but at least’s it’s something
you can use as a starting point for your own customizations.
We start with a dialog template,
whose edit control will be the target of a custom autocomplete.