The Old New Thing

November 2013 - Page 2 of 3 - 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 ...
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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? Ugh. A stack trace taken without working symbols. (There's no way that Dll­Get­Class­Object is a deeply recursive 60KB function. Just by casual inspection, you know that the symbols are wrong.) To see how to fix this, you just have to understand what the debugger does when it has no symbols to ...

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: The string being formatted is There was an error processing the object '%1'., and the insertion is a long (but valid) string. A unit test which passes a similarly long object name to Record­Failure does not crash. What is the...
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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...

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...
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