July 2014 | Page 2 of 3 | The Old New Thing

The time one of my colleagues debugged a line-of-business application for a package delivery service

Raymond Chen July 18, 2014 Jul 18, 2014 07/18/14

Back in the days of Windows 95 development, one of my colleagues debugged a line-of-business application for a major delivery service. This was a program that the company gave to its top-tier high-volume customers, so that they could place and track their orders directly. And by directly, I mean that the program dialed the modem (since ...

Outdoor Trek: Mirror, Mirror starts this weekend

Raymond Chen July 17, 2014 Jul 17, 2014 07/17/14

As previously noted, Outdoor Trek will be staging live performances of the Star Trek episode Mirror, Mirror. The schedule is up. Three weekends starting this Saturday at Blanche Lavizzo Park. Saturday performances are 7pm; Sunday performances are 2pm. Admission is free. Attend if you dare...

What does it mean when GetQueuedCompletionStatus return ERROR_SEM_TIMEOUT?

Raymond Chen July 17, 2014 Jul 17, 2014 07/17/14

A customer asked for assistance interpreting a failure of the GetQueuedCompletionStatus function. We are observing that GetQueuedCompletionStatus is intermittently behaving as follows: That's all the information we have in our log files. We don't know the value of numberOfBytes or completion...

How do I configure Windows Update programmatically?

Raymond Chen July 16, 2014 Jul 16, 2014 07/16/14

First of all, normal programs shouldn't be messing with Windows Update configuration. That's something the user (or the user's administrator) decides. If you're an IT administrator, then you can use Group Policy to configure Windows Update on your network. But maybe you're a special case where the above remarks don't apply. Say you're a ...

Why does Outlook map Ctrl+F to Forward instead of Find, like all right-thinking programs?

Raymond Chen July 15, 2014 Jul 15, 2014 07/15/14

It's a widespread convention that the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut initiates a Find operation. Word does it, Excel does it, Wordpad does it, Notepad does it, Internet Explorer does it. But Outlook doesn't. Why doesn't Outlook get with the program? Rewind to 1995. The mail team was hard at work on their mail client, known as Exchange (code name ...

Enumerating integer compositions (the return of the binomial coefficients)

Raymond Chen July 14, 2014 Jul 14, 2014 07/14/14

In number theory, a composition of an integer is an ordered sequence of positive integers which sum to the target value. For example, the value 3 can be written as 3, 1+2, 2+1, or 1+1+1. You can think about the target number as a string of stars, and a composition is a way of breaking the stars into groups. For example, here are the ...

If I duplicate a handle, can I keep using the duplicate after closing the original?

Raymond Chen July 11, 2014 Jul 11, 2014 07/11/14

A customer asked whether it was okay to use a duplicated handle even after the original handle was closed. Yes. That's sort of why you would duplicate it. Duplicating a handle creates a second handle which refers to the same underlying object as the original. Once that's done, the two handles are completely equivalent. There's no way to know...

Using the REFIID/void** pattern for returning COM objects for future-proofing and to avoid problems with dependencies

Raymond Chen July 10, 2014 Jul 10, 2014 07/10/14

Suppose you have a function that creates a reference to a COM object: There are a few issues with this design. First of all, it requires that whoever uses your header file must have included shlobj.h first, since that's where IShellItem is defined. You could solve that problem by putting #include <shlobj.h> at the top of pixie...

Why are only some of the Windows 7 system notification icons colorless?

Raymond Chen July 9, 2014 Jul 9, 2014 07/9/14

André decided to play "gotcha" by noting that not all of the notification icons went colorless and wondered what the criteria was for deciding which ones to make colorless and which ones to make colorful. It's very simple: The design team generated colorless versions of the most commonly-seen notification icons. They didn't have the...

How do I turn off email reminders for my Windows Live calendar, and disable the birthday calendar while I'm at it?

Raymond Chen July 8, 2014 Jul 8, 2014 07/8/14

While having lunch with my colleagues a few days ago, they complained that they get annoying email for all their calendar events. I mentioned, "So turn off the email notifications." "You can do that?" they replied, incredulous. Here's how you do it. First, go to calendar.live.com and sign in to your calendar. In the upper right ...

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