Showing archive results for 2014

A corporate customer had a problem with their employees accidentally deleting folders like Videos and Pictures and are looking for a way to restore them, short of blowing away the entire user profile and starting over. They found some techniques on the Internet but they don't always work consistently or completely. What is the recommended way of r...

Today we have another example of Le Chatelier's Principle as interpreted by John Gall: Every system resists its proper functioning. There was a video card manufacturer which was using the key so that they could inject their DLL into every process. I have no idea why. Perhaps to get a nice bonus. In Windows Vista, the registry key was deactiv...

Today we'll do a scripting version of an old C++ program: Printing information about the items in the Recycle Bin. (How you wish to act on the information is up to you.) This is a pattern we've seen a lot. Bind to a folder, enumerate its contents, extract properties. Wow, that was way easier than doing it in C++! Just for fun, I'll do it ...

One of my colleagues frustrates his family by hiding the eggs for the annual Egg Hunt way too well. "Apparently, drawers and freezers are out of bounds in the traditional egg hunt." Here are my house rules for Easter Egg Hunts: Personally, I like to hide eggs in plain sight. It's surprising how long it can take somebody to find a yellow egg res...

If you use one of the command line debuggers based on the Debugger Engine, you can set a breakpoint on a function whose name contains spaces or other special characters by quoting the symbol name. The trick here is that you do not quote the entire string; you quote only the symbol name. Note that the quotation marks do not go around the part....

A customer observed that if you use the Windows 8 Bing app with the touch keyboard, the top of the touch keyboard includes autocomplete suggestions for quick access. They wanted to know how to enable this in their own application. In the illustration below, it's the two boxes immediately above the keyboard with the words "aol" and "amazon". T...

A customer wanted a complete list of all notifications balloon tips in Windows. There is no such list. Each component is responsible for its own balloon tips and is not required to submit their list of balloon tips to any central authority for cataloging. In order to create such a list, somebody would have to go contact every component team and as...

When I learned that my nieces were heading out on a road trip, I asked, "Are you going to sing songs?" My eldest niece looked at me as if I were from Mars, then replied, "No, we bring electronics."

A bar check sounds like the sort of thing you receive at the end of a long evening of drinking, but that's not what a bar check is. Among the things that happen at ship room meetings is reviewing each bug that has a proposed fix and deciding whether to accept or reject the fix. Another thing that happens at ship room meetings is the bar check: Th...

Today's post about binomial coefficients was intended to be a warm-up for Catalan numbers, but it turns out Eric Lippert already covered them, first in the context of binary trees, then in the context of arbitrary trees and forests, and then again in the context of matched parentheses. Another way of seeing the correspondence between forests an...