October 31, 2014Oct 31, 201410/31/14A customer reported that they had a file that was “haunted”
on their machine:
Explorer was unable to copy the file.
If you did a copy/paste, the copy dialog displayed an error.
1 Interrupted Action
Invalid file handle
⚿
Contract Proposal
Size: 110 KB
Date modified: 10/31/2013 7:00 AM
Okay,
October 30, 2014Oct 30, 201410/30/14Anon is interested in why the FAT driver is called FASTFAT.SYS. “Was there an earlier slower FAT driver? What could you possibly get so wrong with a FAT implementation that it needed to be chucked out?”
The old FAT driver probably had a boring name like,
October 29, 2014Oct 29, 201410/29/14A customer wanted to know if is possible for an application to edit the user’s Start page.
No, there is no interface for editing the user’s Start page or even knowing what is on it. The Start page is the user’s personal space and applications should not be messing with it.
October 28, 2014Oct 28, 201410/28/14A customer asked how they could have their program prevent the system from going to the idle state. Specifically, when the system goes idle, the application gets into a weird state where it starts leaking memory like crazy. The program normally uses around 100MB of memory,
October 27, 2014Oct 27, 201410/27/14Suppose you had n indistinguishable balls
and k distinguishable boxes.
Enumerate the ways of distributing the balls into boxes.
Some boxes may be empty.
We can represent each distribution in the form of
n stars and
k − 1 vertical lines.
October 24, 2014Oct 24, 201410/24/14Today we’re going to debug a hang.
Here are some of the (redacted) stacks of the process.
I left some red herrings and other frustrations.
0: kd> !process ffffe000045ef940 7
PROCESS ffffe000045ef940
SessionId: 1 Cid: 0a50 Peb: 7ff6b661f000 ParentCid: 0a0c
DirBase: 12e5c6000 ObjectTable: ffffc0000288ae80 HandleCount: 1742.
October 23, 2014Oct 23, 201410/23/14A customer was doing some diagnostic work and wanted a way to detect
whether the
/3GB switch was enabled.
(Remember that the /3GB switch is
meaningful only for 32-bit versions of Windows.)
The way to detect the setting is to call
GetSystemInfo and look at the
lpMaximumApplicationAddress.
October 22, 2014Oct 22, 201410/22/14You might have an application (like a game) where the default
touch contact visualizations are a distraction.
In WinRT, you can disable the contact visualizations by simply saying
// JavaScript
Windows.UI.Input.PointerVisualizationSettings.
getForCurrentView().
isContactFeedbackEnabled = false;
// C#
Windows.UI.Input.PointerVisualizationSettings.
GetForCurrentView().
IsContactFeedbackEnabled = false;
October 21, 2014Oct 21, 201410/21/14Before you ask a question about regular expressions,
you should make sure you and your audience agree on
which regular expression language you are talking about.
Here is a
handy table of which features are supported by
which regular expression language.
October 20, 2014Oct 20, 201410/20/14Today’s Little Program takes a random walk through MSDN
by starting at the CreateProcess page
and randomly clicking links.
The exercise is not as important as the technique it demonstrates.
function randomwalk(ie, steps) {
for (var count = 0; count <
