Showing results for April 2014 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

Apr 17, 2014
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How can I get the Windows 8 touch keyboard to display autocomplete suggestions like the Bing app?

Raymond Chen
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". T...

Code
Apr 16, 2014
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There is no complete list of all notifications balloon tips in Windows

Raymond Chen
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 and as...

Tips/Support
Apr 15, 2014
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The gradual erosion of the car trip experience, part 2

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

When I learned that my nieces were heading out on a road trip, I asked, "Are you going to sing songs?" My eldest niece looked at me as if I were from Mars, then replied, "No, we bring electronics."

Non-Computer
Apr 15, 2014
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Microspeak: bar check

Raymond Chen
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 check: Th...

OtherMicrospeak
Apr 14, 2014
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The geeky thrill of discovering that two things are really the same thing, just with different labels

Raymond Chen
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 forests an...

Other
Apr 14, 2014
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Enumerating subsets with binomial coefficients

Raymond Chen
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 at th...

Code
Apr 11, 2014
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Windows is not a Microsoft Visual C/C++ Run-Time delivery channel

Raymond Chen
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 MFC,...

Code
Apr 10, 2014
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Why does PrintWindow hate CS_PARENTDC? redux

Raymond Chen
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 situati...

Code
Apr 8, 2014
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Why is Rundll32 called Rundll32 and not just Rundll?

Raymond Chen
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) and (...

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