The Old New Thing

February 2014 - Page 3 of 3 - The Old New Thing

The United States Team uniforms for the opening ceremony is rather hideous, and illegal, and a bit anachronistic

February 6, 2014 Feb 6, 2014 02/6/14
Raymond Chen
By the time you read this, the opening ceremony for a large sporting event organized by a lawsuit-happy organization may already have taken place. As part of the ceremony, the team representing the United States entered wearing ugly uniforms. They're so ugly that even the hideous Christmas sweater in your closet, the one with the reindeer ...

If an asynchronous I/O completes synchronously, is the hEvent in the OVERLAPPED structure signaled anyway?

February 6, 2014 Feb 6, 2014 02/6/14
Raymond Chen
Yes. When an I/O completes (whether synchronously or asynchronously), the event is signaled and completion status notifications are queued. The function can be used to wait on an I/O that has already completed; it will merely return immediately. If you ask whether the I/O has completed, and the I/O completed synchronously, it will correctly...

How do I prevent folders like My Pictures from being recreated?

February 5, 2014 Feb 5, 2014 02/5/14
Raymond Chen
Another converse of How do I programmatically create folders like My Pictures if they were manually deleted? and Why do folders like "My Pictures" come back after I delete them? is How do I prevent folders like My Pictures from being recreated? Starting in Windows 7, there is a group policy called Disable Known Folders which lets you ...

Racing email against a snail

February 4, 2014 Feb 4, 2014 02/4/14
Raymond Chen
The Windows team double-dogfoods Windows Server and Exchange Server, and while this is good for both products, it can be quite frustrating when something goes wrong. I remember back in the early days of the Windows 95 project, the mail servers once got so messed up that some email messages were not delivered for several days. After a ...

How can I make a WNDPROC or DLGPROC a member of my C++ class?

February 3, 2014 Feb 3, 2014 02/3/14
Raymond Chen
Continuing my discussion of How can I make a callback function a member of my C++ class? Common special cases for wanting to use a member function as a callback function are the window procedure and its cousin the dialog procedure. The question, then, is where to put the reference data. Let's start with window procedures. The function ...