Showing archive results for 2013

A customer was adding diagnostics to their application and wanted to know if there was a way to detect that the application was being slow in processing its input. These sorts of delays manifest themselves to the end user as a sluggish application which is slow to respond to input events. They already had a watchdog timer that was reset every time...

Consider this simple function: Depending on your screen resolution and font choices, this may end up displaying like this: That line break was awfully unfortunate, stranding the number 2 on a line by itself. (In publishingspeak, this is known as a orphan.) You can't control where the function will insert line breaks, but you can try to i...

Many functions and interfaces provide the option of passing either a string or an integer. The parameter is formally declared as a string, and if you want to pass an integer, you smuggle the integer inside a pointer by using the macro. For example, the function lets you load an resource specified by integer identifier by passing the identifier in...

The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks calls out abuse of the quotation mark. For some reason, quotation marks are being increasingly used as a form of emphasis (a usage which remains controversial), by people unaware that such use, when interpreted as scare quotes, serves to undermine their original point. Mind you, the emphasis theory do...

A customer had a question about whether moving a file recalculated inherited permissions. They found that on their Windows Server 2008 R2 machine, if they moved a file between directories with different inheritable ACEs, then the security descriptor is recalculated to match the destination folder, if they perform the move from the machine itse...

I dreamed that I was part of the crew of an underwater spaceship, and we had to deal with an alligator that got on board. How the alligator got on board was never explained, but now is not the time to ask questions because, you know, alligator. The plan was to flood the ship and wash the alligator out. There were only enough air pills for the fema...

Today's Little Program shows a custom source for autocomplete. It's nothing exciting, but at least's it's something you can use as a starting point for your own customizations. We start with a dialog template, whose edit control will be the target of a custom autocomplete. Just for fun, I wrote the program in ATL. Instead of complaining that ...

You have in your hands an , and you want to know whether this is an that represents My Computer. There are a few ideas that may occur to you. One is to ask the folder for its current location and compare it to . Okay, we have a lot of moving parts here. Let's look at them one at a time. The function takes an object and asks what folder it r...

Hokkien: This is the language I learned first, so to me it sounds perfectly normal and is in fact how languages should sound. I find it odd that people describe it as one of the more difficult languages to learn. I mean, sure it has a large tone repertoire (eight theoretical, though only seven in practice) and extensive tone sandhi, but that's what...

Although you are more than welcome to stop using DDE (please oh please stop using it), there are still many applications which still use it (cough), and as a result, customers still have questions about it. One customer wanted to know why, if multiple copies of a DDE-based application are running, Windows 7 will send the command to the earli...