The Old New Thing

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

How can I query the location of the taskbar on secondary monitors?

December 18, 2014 Dec 18, 2014 12/18/14
Raymond Chen
A customer wanted to know how to get the location of the taskbar on secondary monitors. "I know that will tell me the location of the taskbar on the primary monitor, but how do I get its location on secondary monitors?" We asked the customer what their actual problem is, where they think that determining the taskbar location on secondary ...
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It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway: Account vulnerable to Active Directory administrator

December 17, 2014 Dec 17, 2014 12/17/14
Raymond Chen
A security vulnerability report came in that went something like this: Disclosure of arbitrary data from any user An attacker can obtain arbitrary data from any user by means of the following steps: There's no point continuing, because the first step assumes that you are on the other side of the airtight hatchway. If you have ...

If you set up roaming profiles, you are expected to set up each machine identically, for the most part

December 16, 2014 Dec 16, 2014 12/16/14
Raymond Chen
A customer discovered the following behavior when they set up roaming user profiles on their domain. Consider two machines, 1 and 2. An application A is installed on machine 1, but not machine 2. A user with a roaming profile logs onto machine 1 and pins application A to the taskbar. That user then logs off ...

When corporate policies meet precision scientific equipment

December 15, 2014 Dec 15, 2014 12/15/14
Raymond Chen
One of my colleagues used to work as an IT consultant, and one of his clients was a tobacco company. Since they were a tobacco company, the company policy on smoking was "You can smoke anywhere, any time." "Anywhere" includes the labs. The labs with very expensive precision scientific equipment. My colleague told me that this policy meant ...

Notes on calculating constants in SSE registers

December 15, 2014 Dec 15, 2014 12/15/14
Raymond Chen
There are a few ways to load constants into SSE registers. Load them from memory. Load them from general purpose registers via . Insert selected bits from general purpose registers via . Try to calculate them in clever ways. Loading constants from memory incurs memory access penalties. Loading or inserting them from general ...
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Detecting whether a SID is well-known SID

December 12, 2014 Dec 12, 2014 12/12/14
Raymond Chen
You might think that the function would tell you whether a SID is well-known, but it doesn't. Rather, it tells you whether a SID exactly matches the well-known SID you specified. For example, you can ask, "Is this the Authenticated Users SID?" or "Is this the Everyone SID?" But you can't ask, "Is this any type of well-known SID?" I guess ...
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What states are possible in a DRAWITEMSTRUCT structure?

December 11, 2014 Dec 11, 2014 12/11/14
Raymond Chen
The structure has an member which contains a number of bits describing the state of the item being drawn. How do those states map to the underlying control? Most of the states are rather obvious. For a list box item to be selected, it means that the item is part of the selection. But what does selected mean for a button? Since people like ...
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If you get a procedure address by ordinal, you had better be absolutely sure it's there, because the failure mode is usually indistinguishable from success

December 10, 2014 Dec 10, 2014 12/10/14
Raymond Chen
A customer reported that the function was behaving strangely. We have this code in one of our tests: Recently, this test started failing in bizarre ways. When we stepped through the code, we discovered that ends up calling instead of . The first time we try to test , we get stack corruption because has a different function prototype...
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