December 2016 | The Old New Thing

2016 year-end link clearance

Raymond ChenDecember 30, 2016Dec 30, 201612/30/16

And the customary plug for my series of short videos on One Dev Minute:

The invisible work of preparing PC BIOSes for the year 2000

Raymond ChenDecember 30, 2016Dec 30, 201612/30/16

Some time ago, I told stories of the anxiety on the evening of December 31, 1999 at Microsoft and at Microsoft Press. This prompted a now-retired colleague of mine to share a story about the run-up to the year 2000. The core kernel team had wrapped up their Windows 2000 work well before the end of the year 1999.¹ But instead of the trad

The evolution of the text size limits related to the standard static control

Raymond ChenDecember 29, 2016Dec 29, 201612/29/16

Michael Quinlan wondered about the text size limits related to the standard static control.¹ We start with the resource format, since that was the limiting factor in the original problem. The original 16-bit resource format represented strings as null-terminated sequences of bytes, so in theory they could have been arbitrarily large. How

The case of the four unlabeled toggle buttons

Raymond ChenDecember 28, 2016Dec 28, 201612/28/16

In an Insider build of Windows 10 some time ago, there was a bug that caused four new toggle buttons to show up in the Settings app, but with no description aside from "On" and "Off". Off The fact that this was a known bug didn't stop people on the Windows team from wishing what the toggles really did. In reality, th

Why don’t I get properly translated program output after installing the corresponding language pack?

Raymond ChenDecember 27, 2016Dec 27, 201612/27/16

A customer reported that they installed the Portuguese (Portugal) language pack, but even after rebooting, the ipconfig command still printed results in English. Same problem occurs with Turkish. But German is fine. What's going on? There are multiple levels of localization. This page has some nice diagrams which illustrate them. I've reprod

Wireless AC is, unfortunately, not what it sounds like

Raymond ChenDecember 26, 2016Dec 26, 201612/26/16

I saw a laptop advertised as supporting "Wireless AC". I thought to myself, "Sweet, no more power cables!" Unfortunately, it was not referring to wireless alternating current. It was referring to the 802.11ac wireless networking standard. Because of course the standard that comes after 802.11n should be called 802.11ac. The first few 802.

The mother lode of well-known SIDs

Raymond ChenDecember 23, 2016Dec 23, 201612/23/16

For your enjoyment, I share with you a link to the most comprehensive list of well-known SIDs I've found yet. A little present for the holidays.

Another pattern for using the InitOnce functions

Raymond ChenDecember 22, 2016Dec 22, 201612/22/16

In my survey of patterns for using the InitOnce functions, I omitted the synchronous two-phase initialization. The synchronous two-phase initialization is similar to the simple callback-based version in that only one thread gets to attempt an initialization at a time. But instead of doing the initialization in a callback, you do the initializ

What is the maximum numeric value for a socket, and what is the maximum number of sockets a Windows program can create?

Raymond ChenDecember 21, 2016Dec 21, 201612/21/16

A customer had a problem with their application that used network sockets, and they wanted to know what the maximum numeric value for a socket is. "The program uses a signed integer to hold the socket descriptor, and we found in our testing that the numeric value of INVALID_SOCKET is 0xFFFFFFFF. What is the maximum value?" In addition to bein

If you ask robocopy to destroy the destination, then it will destroy the destination

Raymond ChenDecember 20, 2016Dec 20, 201612/20/16

A customer reported that Explorer was not showing a folder on their hard drive that they were sure was there. I asked them to check whether the folder really was there, by going to a command prompt and using the dir /a command. Turns out the folder really was gone. The customer went back and retraced their steps and reconstructed what happe

The Old New Thing