Showing results for 2014 - Page 30 of 31 - The Old New Thing

Remember octal? I don't.

There are a whole bunch of things in Windows that call themselves message queues, and none of them have anything to do with each other. There is the window manager message queue, which holds window messages. And there is the Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) which is a networking technology for allowing multiple computers to communicate with each ...

Windows 8 added a new hotkey: Win+PrtSc takes a snapshot of your screen and puts it into the Screenshots folder of your Pictures library. But what if you are on a tablet with no PrtSc key? On tablets, you can perform the same operation by pressing Windows button + Volume down. Both of these are the hardware buttons on the tablet, not on any ...

A statistical analysis.

Today's Little Program creates a listview with checkboxes on some items but not other. The extended style is really just a convenience style. Everything it does you could have done yourself, with a bit more typing. It creates a state image list consisting of an unchecked box (state 1) and a checked box (state 2). You could have done t...

A customer wanted to move a file and have it forget all its old ACLs and instead inherit its ACLs from its new location. They found an old article of mine that said If you use to move a file and pass the flag, then it will not preserve the original ACLs on the moved files but will rather recalculate them from the destination's inheritable prop...

Yes, but it won't actually do much.

A customer reported that when they right-clicked a batch file, a bunch of commands were missing. For example, Open was gone! Okay, there really isn't much of a story here, because some direct debugging quickly identified the culprit. The customer had installed a third party shell extension which returned a huge value from its method. Explorer t...

A customer was running Windows Server 2003 ("Still in support until 2015!") and they have some custom application that monitors all disk accesses. They noticed that there were a lot of failed Alternate Data Stream queries coming from Explorer, and that was causing the custom application's logs to fill with largely useless information. These Altern...

My father recently retired after over 40 years as a college professor. During that time, he has seen all sorts of lame excuses students offer for missing homework assignments. Eventually, he got tired of dealing with them, so he instituted the following homework policy: There are nine homework assignments in this class, broken into three groups o...