The Old New Thing

April 2014 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

How can I get the Windows 8 touch keyboard to display autocomplete suggestions like the Bing app?

April 17, 2014 Apr 17, 2014 04/17/14
Raymond Chen
A customer observed that if you use the Windows 8 Bing app with the touch keyboard, the top of the touch keyboard includes autocomplete suggestions for quick access. They wanted to know how to enable this in their own application. In the illustration below, it's the two boxes immediately above the keyboard with the words "aol" and "amazon...

There is no complete list of all notifications balloon tips in Windows

April 16, 2014 Apr 16, 2014 04/16/14
Raymond Chen
A customer wanted a complete list of all notifications balloon tips in Windows. There is no such list. Each component is responsible for its own balloon tips and is not required to submit their list of balloon tips to any central authority for cataloging. In order to create such a list, somebody would have to go contact every component team ...

Microspeak: bar check

April 15, 2014 Apr 15, 2014 04/15/14
Raymond Chen
A bar check sounds like the sort of thing you receive at the end of a long evening of drinking, but that's not what a bar check is. Among the things that happen at ship room meetings is reviewing each bug that has a proposed fix and deciding whether to accept or reject the fix. Another thing that happens at ship room meetings is the bar ...

The geeky thrill of discovering that two things are really the same thing, just with different labels

April 14, 2014 Apr 14, 2014 04/14/14
Raymond Chen
Today's post about binomial coefficients was intended to be a warm-up for Catalan numbers, but it turns out Eric Lippert already covered them, first in the context of binary trees, then in the context of arbitrary trees and forests, and then again in the context of matched parentheses. Another way of seeing the correspondence between ...

Enumerating subsets with binomial coefficients

April 14, 2014 Apr 14, 2014 04/14/14
Raymond Chen
Inspired by the Little Program which enumerates set partitions, I decided to do the binomial coefficients this week. In other words, today's Little Program generates all subsets of size k from a set of size n. As before, the key is to interpret a recurrence combinatorially. In general, when a recurrence is of the form A + B, it means that ...

Windows is not a Microsoft Visual C/C++ Run-Time delivery channel

April 11, 2014 Apr 11, 2014 04/11/14
Raymond Chen
There's a DLL in the system directory called , and from its name, you might think that it is the Microsoft Visual C/C++ Run-Time library. That is a perfectly reasonable guess. But it would also be wrong. The Microsoft Visual C/C++ Run-Time libraries go by names like or or or , and the debugging versions have a in there, too. And like...

Why does PrintWindow hate CS_PARENTDC? redux

April 10, 2014 Apr 10, 2014 04/10/14
Raymond Chen
Why does hate ? Because everybody hates ! Commenter kero claims that it's "easy to fix" the problem with and . You just remove the style temporarily, then do the normal , then restore the style. The question is then why simply doesn't do this. The question assumes that the described workaround actually works. It may work in limited ...

What happens to my COM server-side object when clients die unexpectedly?

April 9, 2014 Apr 9, 2014 04/9/14
Raymond Chen
Suppose you have a COM server object that runs out-of-process. A client connects to the COM server and creates an object. And then the client crashes. What happens to the server object? It will get released eventually. COM periodically checks whether the clients are still alive, and it runs down interfaces from dead clients. Run-down (often ...

Why is Rundll32 called Rundll32 and not just Rundll?

April 8, 2014 Apr 8, 2014 04/8/14
Raymond Chen
There is an oft-abused program named . Why does its name end in ? Why not just call it ? (I will for the moment ignore the rude behavior of calling people stupid under the guise of asking a question.) Because there needed to be a way to distinguish the 16-bit version from the 32-bit version. Windows 95 had both (the 16-bit version) ...