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

Update: Daniel points out that there is still a race condition here, so this trick won't work. Rats. The documentation for the says This prevents a deadlock from occurring when one thread in DllMain is waiting for the callback to end, and another thread that is executing the callback attempts to acquire the loader lock. If the DLL containi...

The entry point is exported by COM in-proc servers. COM host applications call periodically to ask COM to do DLL housecleaning, and in response, COM asks each DLL if it is okay to be unloaded. If so, then COM unloads the DLL. What is not well-known is that COM also does DLL housecleaning when you shut down the last apartment by calling . When ...

The function seems pointless. I mean, all the function does is Who needs such a trivial function? If I wanted to do that, I could just write it myself. And then you discover that occasionally your program crashes. What's going on? Let's rewind and look at the original problem. Originally, you had code that did something like this: Th...

I dreamed that I arrived at my polling station just before it closed, but the ballot was not what I expected. Instead of voting on political candidates or referenda, I was voting on music from the 1980's. I ended up voting for an Anne Murray song because it was the only one I recognized, and it wasn't a bad song.

When you download a file via Internet Explorer, the file is tagged with a little bit of information known as a zone identifier which remembers where the file was downloaded from. This is what tells Explorer to put up the "Yo, did you really want to run this program?" prompt and which is taken into account by applications so that they can do things...

There are a number of functions in Win32 that obtain the current date and time. Here's how they fit together: The starting point is . This returns the current time in UTC in the form of a structure. This also happens to be the time format used internally by the system, so this value can be retrieved with a minimum of fuss. You can also call ...