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    The Old New Thing

    October 2014

    The case of the file that won't copy because of an Invalid Handle error message
    Raymond ChenRaymond ChenOctober 31, 2014Oct 31, 201410/31/14

    A 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,

    Why is the FAT driver called FASTFAT? Why would anybody ever write SLOWFAT?
    Raymond ChenRaymond ChenOctober 30, 2014Oct 30, 201410/30/14

    Anon 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,

    The contents of the Start page are not programmatically accessible
    Raymond ChenRaymond ChenOctober 29, 2014Oct 29, 201410/29/14

    A 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.

    A question about preventing the system from going to the idle state turns out to be misguided
    Raymond ChenRaymond ChenOctober 28, 2014Oct 28, 201410/28/14

    A 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,

    Enumerating the ways of distributing n balls into k boxes
    Raymond ChenRaymond ChenOctober 27, 2014Oct 27, 201410/27/14

    Suppose 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.

    Debugging a hang: Chasing the wait chain inside a process
    Raymond ChenRaymond ChenOctober 24, 2014Oct 24, 201410/24/14

    Today 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.

    How can I detect programmatically whether the /3GB switch is enabled?
    Raymond ChenRaymond ChenOctober 23, 2014Oct 23, 201410/23/14

    A 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.

    How do I disable Windows 8 touch contact visualizations for my application?
    Raymond ChenRaymond ChenOctober 22, 2014Oct 22, 201410/22/14

    You 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;

    The great thing about regular expression languages is that there are so many to choose from!
    Raymond ChenRaymond ChenOctober 21, 2014Oct 21, 201410/21/14

    Before 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.

    Scripting an Internet Explorer window
    Raymond ChenRaymond ChenOctober 20, 2014Oct 20, 201410/20/14

    Today’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 <

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