July 2016 | Page 2 of 3 | The Old New Thing

Trying to recover from enhancement software that generates fake input incorrectly

Raymond ChenJuly 15, 2016Jul 15, 201607/15/16

A customer had a program that supported the mouse wheel, and they found that some laptops have trackpad enhancement software which supports a gesture for turning the mouse wheel. When the enhancement software recognizes the gesture, it sends a WM_MOUSEWHEEL message to the foreground window.. This causes problems for the program because th

How can I preallocate disk space for a file without it being reported as readable?

Raymond ChenJuly 14, 2016Jul 14, 201607/14/16

A customer wanted to create a file with the following properties: The file has a known maximum size. (The file is a log file, and when the log file gets full, the program closes the log file and creates a new one.) Disk space for the log file should be preallocated up to the maximum size. Aside from the fact that disk space for th

What happens if I have multiple asynchronous ReadDirectoryChangesW calls outstanding on the same directory handle?

Raymond ChenJuly 13, 2016Jul 13, 201607/13/16

A customer ran into an issue with the ReadDirectoryChangesW function. It was rather complicated, but one corner of the issue boiled down to the following: The customer had multiple asynchronous calls to ReadDirectoryChangesW outstanding. What if anything can be said about the results? First, we'll give the answer while wea

Why does the Windows 8 sign-in animation slide upward?

Raymond ChenJuly 12, 2016Jul 12, 201607/12/16

The early design for the animation that occurs when you sign in was to take your logon wallpaper and open it up like a curtain. ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ This worked well for na

Where can I get the glossary of Microsoft’s standard translations for computer terms?

Raymond ChenJuly 11, 2016Jul 11, 201607/11/16

A customer wanted to know where to get a glossary of Microsoft's standard translations of computer terms. The Microsoft Language Portal has a bunch of localization resources, including Interactive search Terminology collection Style guides I mentioned the style guide before, but I never linked to the other resources

It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway: Elevating the elevator

Raymond ChenJuly 8, 2016Jul 8, 201607/8/16

The EPAL tool is used on Windows 2000 systems as an application compatibility workaround: If there is some program that requires elevation, but you don't want to give your users administrator privileges, you can use the EPAL tool to run that program with the security of the EPAL program, but under the identity of the unprivileged user. The id

Even if you modify a high contrast theme so it isn’t quite so high-contrast, it’s still a high contrast theme

Raymond ChenJuly 7, 2016Jul 7, 201607/7/16

A customer liaison sent a question to the shell team. Subject: Assistance [REG:628318530717959] Our customer has created a custom theme by editing one of the standard High Contrast themes, but it doesn't seem to be working quite right. For example, Internet Explorer doesn't show Web page background images. How can we fix this? Details from t

Mathematical term or Hollywood movie?

Raymond ChenJuly 6, 2016Jul 6, 201607/6/16

Another little quiz. Today is the start of the 2016 International Math Olympiad. Best of luck to all entrants!

How can I detect whether my PC is in tablet mode?

Raymond ChenJuly 6, 2016Jul 6, 201607/6/16

Tablet Mode, introduced in Windows 10, is a blah blah blah blah. Okay, enough with the introduction. From a Store app, you detect whether you are in tablet mode by inspecting the UserInteractionMode for your view. Sample code for this is given in the UserInteractionMode sample, but the short version is that you do this: The user i

Observing the bizarre rumor mill from the other side

Raymond ChenJuly 5, 2016Jul 5, 201607/5/16

I remember being nonplussed upon reading news reports that some Windows feature or other was a sure thing, despite a lack of actual, y'know, official confirmation. The one that sticks with me is the claim that there would be a 128-bit version of Windows 8. The source for this information was a remark in somebody's LinkedIn profile, which I'm s

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