July 2016

Trying to recover from enhancement software that generates fake input incorrectly

Raymond Chen July 15, 2016 Jul 15, 2016 07/15/16

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 ...

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

Raymond Chen July 14, 2016 Jul 14, 2016 07/14/16

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 ...

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

Raymond Chen July 13, 2016 Jul 13, 2016 07/13/16

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 ...

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

Raymond Chen July 12, 2016 Jul 12, 2016 07/12/16

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 ...

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

Raymond Chen July 11, 2016 Jul 11, 2016 07/11/16

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 Chen July 8, 2016 Jul 8, 2016 07/8/16

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 ...

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

Raymond Chen July 7, 2016 Jul 7, 2016 07/7/16

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 ...

Mathematical term or Hollywood movie?

Raymond Chen July 6, 2016 Jul 6, 2016 07/6/16

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 Chen July 6, 2016 Jul 6, 2016 07/6/16

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 ...

Observing the bizarre rumor mill from the other side

Raymond Chen July 5, 2016 Jul 5, 2016 07/5/16

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 ...

The Old New Thing

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