The Old New Thing

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

Creating custom tasks on a jump list

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

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

December 19, 2013 Dec 19, 2013 12/19/13
Raymond Chen
Suppose you have a program that is written in Arabic or Hebrew and you want to render some text. No problem. You just call and pass the flag to say, "Please render this string in an RTL context." Many other text-rendering functions have a similar flag, such as for . But what if you don't control the call to or or whatever other ...

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

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

December 17, 2013 Dec 17, 2013 12/17/13
Raymond Chen
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 where X is a drive letter on the local machine. The name combines a bunch of internal technical terminology, so it ...

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

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

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

How do you intercept taskbar notification balloons?

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