April 2015

How can I tell if a file is an image of some type?

April 30, 2015 Apr 30, 2015 04/30/15

Raymond Chen

The perceived type tells you what kind of file it is, for a very general sense of the word "kind".

Is the atom returned by RegisterClass(Ex) a "real" atom?

April 29, 2015 Apr 29, 2015 04/29/15

Raymond Chen

A customer was debugging some code that calls RegisterClass on a class that's already been registered. In this case, it was registered by another DLL in the same process. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, because each DLL passes its own instance handle to RegisterClass so that there are no name collisions. However, in this case...

Access to a file's attributes is controlled by two things

April 28, 2015 Apr 28, 2015 04/28/15

Raymond Chen

We saw some time ago that permission to delete a file is granted either File attributes behave in an analogous way. Permission to read a file's attributes is granted either If you want the file's attributes, you could always get it by reading the directory, because one of the pieces of information you get from FindFirstFile ...

Wow, they really crammed a lot into those 410 transistors

April 27, 2015 Apr 27, 2015 04/27/15

Raymond Chen

Just an order of magnitude. Or three. Or more.

How do I extract the path to Control Panel from this shortcut so I can launch it?

April 27, 2015 Apr 27, 2015 04/27/15

Raymond Chen

You don't need to.

Why can't I have variadic COM methods?

April 24, 2015 Apr 24, 2015 04/24/15

Raymond Chen

COM methods cannot be variadic. Why not? Answer: Because the marshaler doesn't know when to stop. Suppose variadic COM methods were possible. And then you wrote this code: How would COM know how to marshal this function call? In other words, suppose that variadic is a pointer to a proxy that refers to an object in another process. The ...