February 28, 2014Feb 28, 201402/28/14Suppose you want your program to behave differently depending on whether it is launched from the Start menu, or by clicking the pinned icon on the taskbar, or by Scheduled Task, or from a service, or whatever. How can a program detect and distinguish these scenarios?
February 27, 2014Feb 27, 201402/27/14Somebody with a rude name wonders what the SEE_MASK_UNICODE flag does.
It does nothing.
The flag was introduced when porting the Windows 95 shell to Windows NT. It happened further back in history than I have permission to access the Windows source code history database,
February 26, 2014Feb 26, 201402/26/14If you have a string like 12345ABCDE67890, and you render it on an Arabic system, you might get ٠١٢٣٤ABCDE67890. The leading digits are rendered as Arabic-Indic digits, but the trailing digits are rendered as European digits. What’s going on here?
This is a feature known as contextual digit substitution.
February 25, 2014Feb 25, 201402/25/14One of my former colleagues on the Windows kernel team wasn’t afraid to make changes all across the system when necessary. If the engineering team decided to upgrade to a new version of the C++ compiler, my colleague was the one who gave it a test-drive on the entire Windows source code,
February 24, 2014Feb 24, 201402/24/14My brother-in-law enjoys greeting his nieces when they come over to visit by throwing them into the air and asking, “叫聲我?” (Who am I?)
The nieces happily reply, “舅舅.” (Uncle.)
He then tosses them up into the air a second time and says,
February 24, 2014Feb 24, 201402/24/14Today’s Little Program logs the contents of every message box dialog,
or anything that vaguely resembles a message box dialog.
(Since there’s no way for sure to know whether a dialog box is
a message box or not.)
using System.Windows.Automation;
class Program
{
[System.STAThread]
public static void Main(string[] args)
{
Automation.AddAutomationEventHandler(
WindowPattern.WindowOpenedEvent,
February 21, 2014Feb 21, 201402/21/14Say you have a collection of programs which work together. One of them is the “master” program that runs the show, and it has a bunch of “assistant” programs that it launches to accomplish various subtasks. These assistants are not meant to be run by themselves;
February 20, 2014Feb 20, 201402/20/14A customer wanted to know how they could write a program that automatically checked and unchecked the box that appears on a file’s property sheet on the General tab, clicking the Advanced button, and then checking or unchecking the item whose name keeps changing:
On Windows 7,
February 19, 2014Feb 19, 201402/19/14If you create a static control with initial contents
(for example, by creating a BITMAP or
ICON control in a dialog template),
then the static control will load the contents upon
creation and destroy the contents upon destruction.
So at least in the case where you don’t touch the
static control,
February 18, 2014Feb 18, 201402/18/14A customer (via their customer liaison) started by asking why they were seeing an unexpected access control entry in the security descriptor of an object.
The ACEs on the parent grant access to Administrators, CREATOR OWNER, SYSTEM, and Users, but the ACEs on the child object (which should simply have been inherited from the parent) include an extra entry for Bob.
