December 2013

Creating custom tasks on a jump list

Raymond Chen December 23, 2013 Dec 23, 2013 12/23/13

Today's Little Program adds a custom task to the application's jump list. Take the scratch program and make the following changes. (Remember, Little Programs do very little error checking because that's how they roll.) This helper function creates an in-memory shell link object with the specified title, command line arguments, and icon. ...

Wouldn't the Recycle Bin sample program have been simpler without COM?

Raymond Chen December 20, 2013 Dec 20, 2013 12/20/13

Steve Wolf suggests that the sample program would have been much simpler had the shell extension model been a flat Win32 interface. Okay, let's try it. Since this is an extension model, each extension needs to specify the callbacks for each namespace operation. Perhaps it could have been done like this: This would be the function that...

How do I display an RTL string in a notification balloon on an LTR system?

Raymond Chen December 19, 2013 Dec 19, 2013 12/19/13

Suppose you have a program that is written in Arabic or Hebrew and you want to render some text. No problem. You just call ExtTextOut and pass the ETO_RTLREADING flag to say, "Please render this string in an RTL context." Many other text-rendering functions have a similar flag, such as DT_RTLREADING for DrawText. ...

Whether your application should display its content in RTL should be based on the content

Raymond Chen December 18, 2013 Dec 18, 2013 12/18/13

A customer had the following puzzle: We have a small bootstrapper application that consists of a dialog box and a few message boxes. The problem is that we want our application to work properly on Arabic and Hebrew systems, and we can't come up with a good way to determine text direction of the underlying system. We found this article by ...

Tales from "The Box": A survey of crackpots in physics

Raymond Chen December 17, 2013 Dec 17, 2013 12/17/13

David Dixon, assistant professor of physics at Saddleback College, gave a presentation while he was at California Polytechnic State University titled Tales from "The Box", in which he presents selected contents of The Box, an archive of what is charitably describe as "unsolicited materials", but which is in more plain language "stuff sent to...

Why doesn't the New Folder command work in the root of a redirected drive resource in a Remote Desktop session?

Raymond Chen December 17, 2013 Dec 17, 2013 12/17/13

When you connect to another computer via Remote Desktop, you have the option of injecting your local drives into the remote computer, known as Device and Resource Redirection. These injected drives are available under the UNC \\tsclient\X where X is a drive letter on the local machine. The name TSCLIENT combines a bunch of internal technical...

That fee was so that we wouldn't have to raise our prices

Raymond Chen December 16, 2013 Dec 16, 2013 12/16/13

I dreamed that I got screwed by Ticketmaster. I was relieved when I woke up and found out it was only a dream. Bonus chatter: The economics of Ticketmaster. It reminds me of a company who added a service fee to an existing rate plan, and in their FAQ for the service fee, they explained, "That fee was so that we wouldn't have to raise our ...

Disabling the PrtSc key by blocking input

Raymond Chen December 16, 2013 Dec 16, 2013 12/16/13

A customer asked how to disable the PrtSc key in the On-Screen Keyboard. There is no way to disable the PrtSc key in the On-Screen Keyboard. The On-Screen Keyboard shows a keyboard, and you can click any virtual key you like. There is no policy to remove specific keys from the On-Screen Keyboard. But this was a case of a customer breaking...

Turning off the disco lights on the Start screen

Raymond Chen December 13, 2013 Dec 13, 2013 12/13/13

On the Windows 8 Start screen, you can pan left and right, and if you are using touch, you can whip the entire screen left and right and send all your tiles flying past. One of the effects we saw when you panned quickly around the Start screen was something we called disco lights, but which formally goes by the much more mundane name ...

How do you intercept taskbar notification balloons?

Raymond Chen December 12, 2013 Dec 12, 2013 12/12/13

A customer wanted to know how they could monitor and intercept taskbar notification balloons. In particular, they wanted to intercept the clicks on a particular balloon and take alternative action. There is no supported mechanism for intercepting taskbar notification balloons or redirecting clicks on them. Imagine if that were possible: ...

The Old New Thing

December 2013 | Page 2 of 4 | The Old New Thing