March 2018 | Page 3 of 3 | The Old New Thing

Torsken har ankommet

Raymond ChenMarch 9, 2018Mar 9, 201803/9/18

I can fake my way through a Norwegian newspaper, but this goes by too fast for me to follow at normal speed. I have to pause each subtitle to give me time to read it. Last year, to introduce the redesigned 100- and 200-krone banknotes, the central bank of Norway recreated the 1980 musical comedy sketch Torsken kommer ("The cod is coming") ...

Why is the daylight saving time cutover time 1 millisecond too soon in some time zones?

Raymond ChenMarch 9, 2018Mar 9, 201803/9/18

If you dig into the Windows time zone database, you'll see that some time zones list the moment when the time zone transitions into or out of daylight saving time as 23:59:59.999 instead of midnight. Why a millisecond too soon? My colleague Matt Johnson spends a lot of time working with time zones and explains many of the strange and wacky ...

What’s the difference between CreateTimerQueueTimer and SetThreadpoolTimer?

Raymond ChenMarch 8, 2018Mar 8, 201803/8/18

A customer wanted to know what the difference is between CreateTimerQueueTimer and SetThreadpoolTimer, and what factors they should consider when choosing between them. (The customer explained that their immediate need was to create a periodic timer that fires every five seconds. It is not critical that the timer fire exactly at five second ...

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When MSDN says `NULL`, is it okay to use `nullptr`?

Raymond ChenMarch 7, 2018Mar 7, 201803/7/18

In various places, MSDN will talk about the behavior corresponding to the case where a handle type has the value NULL. A customer wanted to know whether it was safe to use nullptr in such cases, or whether they have to use NULL. Although the programming languages used by MSDN for documenting Windows are putatively C and C++, MSDN understands ...

Microspeak: The triad, the ad-hoc acronyms that result, and the arithmetic problem 3 × 3

Raymond ChenMarch 6, 2018Mar 6, 201803/6/18

At Microsoft, you'll often encounter three letters put together to form an acronym representing what appears to be a group of people of some sort. Document title: Monthly meeting with CMR CMR will review the status of all projects in the upcoming weeks. From: Morgan ... email message ... Thanks for all your hard work,CMR This acronym ...

Inadvertently designing a horrible time and date picker

Raymond ChenMarch 5, 2018Mar 5, 201803/5/18

Perhaps inspired by the tongue-in-cheek competition to design the worst volume control, an internal tool here at Microsoft managed to create the worst time and date picker: Prev January 2017 Next Okay, the date-picking part isn't so bad (aside from the fact that everything is varying shades of gray), but using sliders to ...

If I call GetExitCodeThread for a thread that I know for sure has exited, why does it still say STILL_ACTIVE?

Raymond ChenMarch 2, 2018Mar 2, 201803/2/18

A customer reported that when they took the thread handle returned by the _beginthread function and passed it to GetExitCodeThread, the function reported that the thread was STILL_ACTIVE, even though the thread is known to have already exited. The customer found this text in the documentation for _beginthread and wants more ...

How does Task Manager choose the icon to show for a process?

Raymond ChenMarch 1, 2018Mar 1, 201803/1/18

When you view the list of Processes in Task Manager, each entry gets a little icon. Where does that icon come from? If the process has a visible window, then Task Manager uses the icon of the window. If the process has no visible windows, but it has a notification icon, then Task Manager uses the notification icon. If the process has no ...

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