The Old New Thing

Programmatically uploading a file to an FTP site

March 10, 2014 Mar 10, 2014 03/10/14

Raymond Chen

Today's Little Program uploads a file to an FTP site in binary mode with the assistance of the Wininet library. This program has sat in my bag of tools for years. The program accepts five command line arguments: site (no "ftp://" in front) userid password path for the file to upload location to place the uploaded file For example, I ...

We're currently using FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING and FILE_FLAG_WRITE_THROUGH, but we would like our WriteFile to go even faster

March 6, 2014 Mar 6, 2014 03/6/14

Raymond Chen

A customer said that their program's I/O pattern is to open a file and then every so often write about 100KB of data into the file. They are currently using the FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING and FILE_FLAG_WRITE_THROUGH flags to open a file, and they wanted to know what else they could do to make their writes go even faster. Um, for one thing, you ...

Why do I have to add 1 to the color index when I set it as the hbrBackground of a window class?

March 5, 2014 Mar 5, 2014 03/5/14

Raymond Chen

Our scratch program sets the background color to COLOR_WINDOW by setting the class background brush as follows: What's with the +1? Okay, first of all, let's backtrack a bit. The real first question is, "What's the deal with taking an integer (COLOR_WINDOW) and casting it to a HBRUSH and expecting anything sane to happen?" The ...

Adventures in automation: Dismissing all message boxes from a particular application but only if they say that the operation succeeded

March 3, 2014 Mar 3, 2014 03/3/14

Raymond Chen

Suppose you have a program that is part of your workflow, and it has the annoying habit of showing a message box when it is finished. You want to automate this workflow, and part of that automation is dismissing the message box. Let's start by writing the annoying program: This annoying program pretends to do work for a little while, and...