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

Nov 20, 2013
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Why don't all of my documents show up when I arrange my Documents library by Name?

Raymond Chen
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 content ...

Tips/Support
Nov 19, 2013
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Why is the Program Files directory called Program Files instead of just Programs?

Raymond Chen
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. They ar...

History
Nov 18, 2013
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My friend lived in a tiny house with an enormous garage

Raymond Chen
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 very...

Non-ComputerDream
Nov 18, 2013
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How can I launch an unelevated process from my elevated process and vice versa?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Going from an unelevated process to an elevated process is easy. You can run a process with elevation by passing the verb to or . 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 could do it, it's not the right thing to do, because ...

Code
Nov 15, 2013
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Restoring symbols to a stack trace originally generated without symbols

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Has this ever happened to you? Ugh. A stack trace taken without working symbols. (There's no way that 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 work from: It uses the symbols from t...

Other
Nov 14, 2013
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Why is my FormatMessage call crashing trying to read my insertion parameter?

Raymond Chen
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 , and the insertion is a long (but valid) string. A unit test which passes a similarly long object name to does not crash. What is the problem? There are clues in the stack trace. The natural place to ...

Code
Nov 11, 2013
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How did Raymond discover his carrier-screaming talent? And his homemade Marauder's Map

Raymond Chen
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 was ...

Non-Computer
Nov 8, 2013
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What's the point of the various …WhenCallbackReturns functions?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The thread pool provides a number of functions named . What's the point of all these functions? Why can't you just do the operation yourself immediately before returning? We saw last time. What's the point of the others? Basically, the same thing as . It's a way to release a resource after execution has left the function and the callback is mar...

Code