Why does upgrading my project to Unicode cause Visual Studio to use a different version of the common controls?

Raymond ChenOctober 31, 2017Oct 31, 201710/31/17

A customer was upgrading a program from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2017. As part of the upgrade, they also decided to recompile it as a Unicode program rather than an ANSI program. And they bumped their WINVER from 0x400 to 0x600. All together, these settings mean that they dropped support for Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, as we

Should I name my file mapping after the file it was created from?

Raymond ChenOctober 30, 2017Oct 30, 201710/30/17

Many times a customer creates a file mapping object and assigns it a name that matches the name of the file it was created from. Mind you, there needs to be some fiddling with the name because backslashes are not allowed in object names (aside from the Local\ or Global\ prefix), so typically people change backslashes to forward slashes, result

How do I preserve the user’s notification icon preferences for my program after I update it?

Raymond ChenOctober 27, 2017Oct 27, 201710/27/17

When a program creates a notification icon, the user can set preferences for that icon: Show icon and notifications, Hide icon and notifications, and Only show notifications. When you update the program, what do you have to do to get those preferences to carry over to the new program? Give your notification icon a GUID. Specifically, in the

How do I prevent my registered hotkey from firing repeatedly due to auto-repeat?

Raymond ChenOctober 26, 2017Oct 26, 201710/26/17

You can register a global hotkey with the Register­Hot­Key function, but one problem many people have is that if the user presses and holds the hotkey sequence, the hotkey will be invoked as fast as auto-repeat will let it. For some types of hotkeys, this is not desirable. How do you prevent this? Starting in Windows 7, you can pass t

A closer look at the complexity analysis of finding the k’th smallest element in two sorted arrays

Raymond ChenOctober 23, 2017Oct 23, 201710/23/17

Given two sorted arrays of the same length, with unique elements, find the kth smallest element in the combined collection. One solution involves the double binary search. I'll let you go read the article to see how it works. I'm here to dissect the complexity analysis. Since every time we remove ¼ elements, the complexity is O(2*log(N

On the gradual improvements in how the system deals with the failure to initialize a critical section

Raymond ChenOctober 20, 2017Oct 20, 201710/20/17

The documentation for the Initialize­Critical­Section function says Return value This function does not return a value. Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP: In low memory situations, Initialize­Critical­Section can raise a STATUS_NO_MEMORY exception. This exception was eliminated starting with Windows Vista. In earlier vers

How do I create a shortcut whose target is specified by a relative path?

Raymond ChenOctober 19, 2017Oct 19, 201710/19/17

Commenter Richard wonders if there's such a thing as a "relative" shortcut whose target is specified by a path relative to the shortcut itself. Let's start with a program that creates a normal shortcut. This is a Little Program which does little to no error checking. When run, this program creates a shortcut to itself in the same directory a

I used WS_EX_COMPOSITED to get rid of my redrawing flicker, but it resulted in sluggish response

Raymond ChenOctober 18, 2017Oct 18, 201710/18/17

A customer enabled the WS_EX_COMPOSITED extended window style in order to solve a flickering problem with their application. That worked great, but they found that it had an unwanted side effect: when the user grabs the scroll bar and starts scrolling up and down the document, the UI does not update smoothly. The customer hoped for some tips o