Showing archive results for 2014

One of my former colleagues on the Windows kernel team wasn't afraid to make changes all across the system when necessary. If the engineering team decided to upgrade to a new version of the C++ compiler, my colleague was the one who gave it a test-drive on the entire Windows source code, and fixed all the warnings and errors that kick up as well as...

My brother-in-law enjoys greeting his nieces when they come over to visit by throwing them into the air and asking, "叫聲我?" (Who am I?) The nieces happily reply, "舅舅." (Uncle.) He then tosses them up into the air a second time and says, "大聲啲!" (Louder!) And the nieces happily shout, "舅...

Today's Little Program logs the contents of every message box dialog, or anything that vaguely resembles a message box dialog. (Since there's no way for sure to know whether a dialog box is a message box or not.) This is the same pattern as the program we wrote last week, but with different guts when the window opens. This time, we see if the...

Say you have a collection of programs which work together. One of them is the "master" program that runs the show, and it has a bunch of "assistant" programs that it launches to accomplish various subtasks. These assistants are not meant to be run by themselves; they are meant to be run only by the master program. How do you design the assistant so...

A customer wanted to know how they could write a program that automatically checked and unchecked the box that appears on a file's property sheet on the General tab, clicking the Advanced button, and then checking or unchecking the item whose name keeps changing: The checkbox maps to the file attribute formally known as , and informally known as...

If you create a static control with initial contents (for example, by creating a or control in a dialog template), then the static control will load the contents upon creation and destroy the contents upon destruction. So at least in the case where you don't touch the static control, things will work automatically. But once you touch it, thing...

A customer (via their customer liaison) started by asking why they were seeing an unexpected access control entry in the security descriptor of an object. The ACEs on the parent grant access to Administrators, CREATOR OWNER, SYSTEM, and Users, but the ACEs on the child object (which should simply have been inherited from the parent) include an ext...

In the Disney adaptation of Cinderella, the Grand Duke wears a monocle. The monocle moves from eye to eye during the course of the story. The Grand Duke's monocle is an affectation. Either that, or he needs a full pair of glasses, but is very frugal.

Today's Little Program uses UI Automation to cancel the Run dialog whenever it appears. Why? Well, it's not really useful in and of itself, but it at least provides an example of using UI Automation to wait for an event to occur and then respond to it. Okay, let's see what's going on here. The program registers a delegate with UI automation w...

A colleague of mine was at a restaurant, and he spotted a young couple at the next table. The woman fawned over a classic diamond engagement ring, and when she put it on her finger, he decided that it was safe to ask them about it. They had gotten engaged earlier that day, and the man told the story of the proposal, up to the point where he asked ...