August 2016

What is a ZDP, and what’s so Z about it?

Raymond Chen August 9, 2016 Aug 9, 2016 08/9/16

You may see an occasional mention of the acronym ZDP, such as this article explaining what OOBE ZDP are for, and this one that says, "I don't know why..." ZDP stands for "Zero Day Package", sometimes redundantly called a "ZDP Package". However, this is not using the term Zero Day in the security vulnerability sense. Rather, it's referring to ...

Why didn’t Windows 95 suck the brains out of the XMS driver?

Raymond Chen August 8, 2016 Aug 8, 2016 08/8/16

In the discussion of the MS-DOS game that required 32 XMS handles, it was suggested that a solution to the problem of figuring out which handles could be used as local handles without conflicting with existing global handles was to suck the brains out of the XMS driver, and thereby have full information about all the outstanding handles. From ...

The case of the hung Explorer window

Raymond Chen August 5, 2016 Aug 5, 2016 08/5/16

A Windows Insider reported that Explorer stopped responding whenever they opened their Downloads folder. We were able to obtain a memory dump during the hang, and observed that most threads were waiting for the loader lock. The loader lock was being held by this thread: This thread was waiting on a GDI+ critical section, which was being held...

The origin story of the Microsoft ninjacat

Raymond Chen August 4, 2016 Aug 4, 2016 08/4/16

So it begins.

Using #pragma detect_mismatch to help catch ODR violations

Raymond Chen August 3, 2016 Aug 3, 2016 08/3/16

One of the more insidious problems you may encounter are those traced back to violations of the C++ One Definition Rule. As a general rule, if the conflicting definitions occur in separate translation units, the behavior is undefined, but no diagnostic is required. The lack of a diagnostic means that if two translation units define a type ...

Why don’t I get a file deletion confirmation warning from Explorer when I undo a copy?

Raymond Chen August 2, 2016 Aug 2, 2016 08/2/16

If you use Explorer to copy a file, and then press Ctrl+Z to undo the copy, and you had file deletion confirmation enabled, then Windows 7 would display a confirmation dialog to verify that you really want to delete the file. But Windows 8 no longer shows that confirmation dialog. A customer wanted to know why. Overwhelming customer feedback ...

How do I disable edge gestures when my window is full screen?

Raymond Chen August 1, 2016 Aug 1, 2016 08/1/16

A customer wanted to disable edge gestures when their program is running full screen. For example, you may want to do this if you are something like the Remote Desktop client, where you want all input (including the edge gestures) to be sent to the remote computer. Fortunately, there's a property specifically designed for what you request. It...

The Old New Thing

August 2016 - Page 3 of 3 - The Old New Thing