The Old New Thing

Why don't all of my documents show up when I arrange my Documents library by Name?

November 20, 2013 Nov 20, 2013 11/20/13

Raymond Chen

A customer reported that when they opened their Documents library on Windows 7, some files were missing if they selected Arrange by: Name or Arrange by: Author or in fact any arrangement other than Arrange by: Folder. What's going on? When you arrange the Documents library by anything other than Folder, the Documents library uses the ...

Why is the Program Files directory called Program Files instead of just Programs?

November 19, 2013 Nov 19, 2013 11/19/13

Raymond Chen

Some people suggest that one thing Microsoft Research could do with that time machine they're working on is to go back in time and change the name of the Program Files directory to simply Programs. No, it really should be Program Files. Program Files are not the same as Programs. Programs are things like Calc, Notepad, Excel, Photoshop. ...

My friend lived in a tiny house with an enormous garage

November 18, 2013 Nov 18, 2013 11/18/13

Raymond Chen

One evening, I had a series of three dreams. In each one, I visited an unusual home. In the first dream, I visited the home of a friend of mine. But instead of living in his condominium in the city, he lived in a house built into the side of a cliff. The house commanded a breathtaking view of the valley below, but the living quarters weren't...

How can I launch an unelevated process from my elevated process and vice versa?

November 18, 2013 Nov 18, 2013 11/18/13

Raymond Chen

Going from an unelevated process to an elevated process is easy. You can run a process with elevation by passing the runas verb to ShellExecute or ShellExecuteEx. Going the other way is trickier. For one thing, it's really hard to munge your token to remove the elevation nature properly. And for another thing, even if you ...

Restoring symbols to a stack trace originally generated without symbols

November 15, 2013 Nov 15, 2013 11/15/13

Raymond Chen

Has this ever happened to you? litware!Ordinal3+0x6042 litware!DllInstall+0x4c90 litware!DllInstall+0x4b9e contoso!DllGetClassObject+0x93c3 contoso!DllGetClassObject+0x97a9 contoso!DllGetClassObject+0x967c contoso!DllGetClassObject+0x94d7 contoso!DllGetClassObject+0x25ce contoso!DllGetClassObject+0x2f7b contoso!DllGetClassObject+0xad55 ...

Why is my FormatMessage call crashing trying to read my insertion parameter?

November 14, 2013 Nov 14, 2013 11/14/13

Raymond Chen

A customer was looking for assistance in debugging a crash in their product. The stack trace looked like this: ntdll!_woutput_l+0x356 ntdll!_vsnwprintf_l+0x81 ntdll!_vsnwprintf+0x11 ntdll!RtlStringVPrintfWorkerW+0x3c ntdll!RtlStringCchPrintfExW+0xa8 ntdll!RtlFormatMessageEx+0x324 KERNELBASE!BaseDllFormatMessage+0x18e KERNELBASE!...

A possibly unbeatable record for the shortest amount of time between an email message and its resend

November 13, 2013 Nov 13, 2013 11/13/13

Raymond Chen

I occasionally bring up the issue of people who ask a question and then repeat the question, especially people who repeat the question with some impatience. At the time, the record for the shortest time between the message and its repeat was eight minutes. But I think I have something unbeatable. From: X To: ABC Team I hit this crash in...

Microspeak: Spinning up or kicking off a build

November 12, 2013 Nov 12, 2013 11/12/13

Raymond Chen

Round and round.

How did Raymond discover his carrier-screaming talent? And his homemade Marauder's Map

November 11, 2013 Nov 11, 2013 11/11/13

Raymond Chen

George wonders, "I am curious how Raymond found about his talent. Maybe it will be an interesting post." This isn't like a superhero who discovers as a young adult that he has powers beyond that of mortal men. And there was no radioactive spider. It was a simple case of problem-solving. The basic way of checking whether the mainframe was up...

What's the point of the various …WhenCallbackReturns functions?

November 8, 2013 Nov 8, 2013 11/8/13

Raymond Chen

The thread pool provides a number of functions named ...WhenCallbackReturns. What's the point of all these functions? Why can't you just do the operation yourself immediately before returning? We saw FreeLibraryWhenCallbackReturns last time. What's the point of the others? Basically, the same thing as Free...

The Old New Thing

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