Showing archive results for 2014

Continuing from Creating a simple pidl: For the times you care enough to send the very fake: Instead of creating a simple pidl, we'll create a simple shell item. The idea is the same. We build a file system bind context containing the information about the fake file, and we pass that bind context to the function. Take that program that creat...

Some time ago, I noted that you can build other interlocked operations out of . Here's an example: (There's a corresponding C++ version, which I leave as an exercise.) This function atomically updates a "highest value seen so far" variable. It follows the usual pattern: Capture the starting value. Do a computation based on that value. Comp...

How could it be?

A customer reported a problem showing an icon on their dialog box. We verified that this code does execute during the handling of the message. No assertion fires, yet no icon appears either. Our dialog template says The customer did some helpful preliminary troubleshooting: Verify that the code does indeed execute. It sounds obvio...

Many many years ago, a customer presumably was taking advantage of the unlimited support part of their support contract when they asked In the documentation for Space Cadet Pinball, it says... The game is divided into three levels of play: basic, intermediate, and advanced. The objective of all levels is to achieve the highest point total. The...

Today's Little Program enumerates bit sequences of a particular length subject to the constraint that you cannot have consecutive 0-bits. This may sound kind of arbitrary, but it is important in magnetic media storage, because you cannot go too long without a flux reversal (traditionally represented by a 1); otherwise, the read head's clock start...

Last year, in honor of Mother's Day (the United States version), the John F. Kennedy Library shared a letter sent by President Kennedy to his mother. Mrs. Kennedy had contacted Premier Khrushchev asking for an autographed photo, copies of which were subsequently forwarded to the White House so that the President could sign them as well. President...

Gabe wondered when the message was introduced. The message was introduced by Win32. It did not exist in 16-bit Windows. But it was there all along. The The message was carefully designed so that it worked in 16-bit Windows automatically. In other words, you retained your source code compatibility between 16-bit and 32-bit Windows without hav...

Commenter Medinoc was baffled by the statement that the decision to use the visual-styles-enabled version of the common controls library is done on a window-by-window basis. " Isn't it rather on a per-module basis, depending on each module's manifest? If it is indeed on a per-window basis, how does one choose?" Whether a particular call to (or ...

Many people have noticed that the and functions (and therefore their BCL equivalent and WinRT equivalent ) fire multiple events when you save a file in Notepad. Why is that? Because multiple things were modified. Notepad opens the file for writing, writes the new data, calls to truncate any excess data (in case the new file is shorter than t...