Showing results for 2014 - Page 4 of 31 - The Old New Thing

Today's Little Program strips diacritics from a Unicode string. Why? Hey, I said that Little Programs require little to no motivation. It might come in handy in a spam filter, since it was popular, at least for a time, to put random accent marks on spam subject lines in order to sneak past keyword filters. (It doesn't seem to be popular any more.)...

My initial reaction to this question was to say, "I don't know if I'd call it wrong, but I'd call it highly inadvisable." I'd like to revise my guidance. It's flat-out wrong, at least in the case where you call it while impersonating. The registry key is bound to the current user at the time the key is first accessed by a process: The mapping...

If you load a library with the flag, then it isn't really loaded in any normal sense. In fact, it's kept completely off the books. If you load a library with the , , or flag (or any similar flag added in the future), then the library gets mapped into the process address space, but it is not a true module. Functions like , , and will not see th...

Often, we get questions from a customer that use the word should in an ambiguous way: Our program creates a widget whose flux capacitor should have reverse polarity. Attached is a sample program that shows how we create the widget with . However, the resulting widget still has a flux capacitor with standard polarity. Can you help us? The phrase...

A customer reported that file version information does not appear on the Details page of the property sheet which appears when you right-click the file and select Properties. They reported that the problem began in Windows 7. The reason that the file version information was not appearing is that the file's extension was . Older versions of ...

If you use the Remote Desktop Connection client to connect to another computer, you have the option of making your local drives available to the remote computer. A customer wanted to know how to enumerate all the drives on the local machine. The were able to get the volumes mapped to drive letters, but they also wanted to get the redirected dri...

Suppose you have a machine that has crashed, and your investigation shows that the reason is that there is a critical section that everybody is waiting for. While waiting for that critical section, work piles up, and eventually the machine keels over. Suppose further that this crash is given to you in the form of a kernel debugger. In case it wa...

The and functions return "the number of milliseconds that have elapsed since the system was started." (The 32-bit version wraps around after around 50 days.) But when exactly is the system considered to have started? Is it when power is applied to the computer? When the BIOS completes POST? When the user picks the operating system from the boot m...

A customer wanted to know how to detect that all startup applications have finished launching. They wanted to wait until everything settled down before proceeding with some task. What if two programs did this? Suppose two programs both wanted to detect that all startup applications have finished launching. Each one would sit there waiting for the...

One thing nobody has called out in my tribute to the Bill Gates Tiger Beat photo, either because it was too subtle or too obvious, is that the photo is actually a mirror image. The arrangement of furniture in the room was not correct: The big table was on the wrong side of the room. It was also too heavy to move around, so we cheated. We staged t...