March 2017

Secret passages on Microsoft main campus, episode 2

Raymond Chen March 20, 2017 Mar 20, 2017 03/20/17

As with most "secret passages" on campus, they aren't actually secret, but they are handy and not well known. If you are trying to walk to the Building 43 cafeteria from the southwest, the usual route is to take the unnamed service road that runs between Building 43 and the highway, then go up the gravel emergency driveway that runs between ...

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Watch out for that throne.

Raymond Chen March 17, 2017 Mar 17, 2017 03/17/17

North Bend is a small town about a half-hour's drive from Seattle, perhaps best known as one of the cities which provided shooting locations for the cult television show Twin Peaks. Earlier this month, the police blotter revealed another intrigue brewing in the quiet town of North Bend: Friday, March 3 Confusion: At 12:25 p.m., police were ...

Not interested in college basketball? No problem. Follow the Name of the Year 2017 bracket

Raymond Chen March 17, 2017 Mar 17, 2017 03/17/17

Name of the Year celebrates people with great names. In the 2016 final, Pope McCorkle III, defeated Sweet Orefice with a 5% margin of victory. The year before that: Amanda Miranda Panda defeated Lancelot Supersad, Jr by a commanding 15%. This year's top four seeds: Follow the competition on the blog or on Twitter. Cast your vote. ...

If I want to maintain a free list of pages, should I use MEM_RESET or MEM_DECOMMIT?

Raymond Chen March 17, 2017 Mar 17, 2017 03/17/17

A customer had a memory-intensive application, and one of the things they do to avoid address space fragmentation is to maintain a list of recently-freed memory and satisfying future allocations from that free list. (The free list has a cap to avoid permanent memory growth, because a cache with a bad policy is another name for a memory leak...

How do I provide data to the sharing pane from a Win32 desktop application?

Raymond Chen March 16, 2017 Mar 16, 2017 03/16/17

Last time, we were able to show the sharing pane from a Win32 desktop application, but we didn't provide any information to the sharing pane, so all it did was offer to share a screen shot. Today, let's provide some data. This is a continuation of the interop pattern. Repeating the table we had from last time: Last time, we used the second ...

How do I show the sharing pane from a Win32 desktop application?

Raymond Chen March 15, 2017 Mar 15, 2017 03/15/17

A customer wanted to show the sharing pane from their Win32 desktop application. In a UWP application, this would be done by calling Windows.ApplicationModel.DataTransfer.DataTransferManager.ShowSharingUI(). Let's do it in a Win32 desktop app by following the basic rules for projection: Static methods are ...

Why is Alt+D the keyboard shortcut for putting focus on the address bar?

Raymond Chen March 14, 2017 Mar 14, 2017 03/14/17

The keyboard shortcut for putting focus on the address bar in Explorer and Internet Explorer (and Edge and the version of Internet Explorer that came with Windows 8 that nobody talks about even though I really liked it) is Alt+D. Why the letter D? Okay, the proximate reason is that there used to be the word "Address" next to the address bar...

Raymond’s highly scientific predictions for the 2017 NCAA men’s basketball tournament

Raymond Chen March 13, 2017 Mar 13, 2017 03/13/17

It's been a few years since the last time, but it's back: Raymond comes up with an absurd, arbitrary criterion for filling out his NCAA bracket. This year, I base it on the average attendance of the team's basketball games. I worked mostly from the numbers released by the NCAA, but there were a few schools not represented in that report, so I...

Which languages are fully-localized by Windows?

Raymond Chen March 13, 2017 Mar 13, 2017 03/13/17

A little while ago, I discussed that not all languages get translated console output. For reference, here are the languages that are fully-localized, including console output: The penultimate row is crossed out because support for full localization of Chinese (Hong Kong) was dropped in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update...

Is GENERIC_ALL equivalent to GENERIC_READ | GENERIC_WRITE | GENERIC_EXECUTE?

Raymond Chen March 10, 2017 Mar 10, 2017 03/10/17

A customer wanted to know whether passing GENERIC_ALL as an access mask is effectively equivalent to passing GENERIC_READ | GENERIC_WRITE | GENERIC_EXECUTE. Specifically, they were interested in the answer to this question with respect to the CreateFile function. Okay, first question first. Is GENERIC_ALL effectively equivalent to ...

The Old New Thing

March 2017 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

Secret passages on Microsoft main campus, episode 2

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Watch out for that throne.

Not interested in college basketball? No problem. Follow the Name of the Year 2017 bracket

If I want to maintain a free list of pages, should I use MEM_RESET or MEM_DECOMMIT?

How do I provide data to the sharing pane from a Win32 desktop application?

How do I show the sharing pane from a Win32 desktop application?

Why is Alt+D the keyboard shortcut for putting focus on the address bar?

Raymond’s highly scientific predictions for the 2017 NCAA men’s basketball tournament

Which languages are fully-localized by Windows?

Is GENERIC_ALL equivalent to GENERIC_READ | GENERIC_WRITE | GENERIC_EXECUTE?

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