If you want to register a window class and use a system color as its background color, you set the member to the desired color, plus one, cast to an : Windows 95 introduced "system color brushes", which are a magic type of brush which always paint in the corresponding system color, even if the system color changes. The brush will alwa...

Earlier this year, one columnist was baffled as to why "Yahoo" was the most searched-for term on Google. I wasn't baffled at all. Back in 2001, Alexa published the top ten most searched-for terms on their service, and four of the top ten were URLs: yahoo.com, hotmail.com, aol.com, and ebay.com. A lot of people simply don't care to learn the diffe...

One of my former managers told me this story from a project he worked on many years ago. This project was broken up into multiple groups, and there was a weekly meeting where representatives from each group got together to discuss how the project was going. One of the groups was responsible for generating the reports and analysis. This was an impo...

A placebo setting that has been getting a lot of play in recent years is that of QoS bandwidth reservation. The setting in question sets a maximum amount of bandwidth that can be reserved for QoS. I guess one thing people forgot to notice is the word "maximum". It doesn't set the amount of reserved bandwidth, just the maximum. Changing the value...

Back in the Windows 95 days, people swore that increasing the value of in the file fixed application errors. People usually made up some pseudo-scientific explanation for why this fixed crashes. These explanations were complete rot. These breakpoints had nothing to do with Windows applications. They were used by 32-bit device drivers to com...

It's just WM_SETCURSOR, but that in itself is rather complicated.

To connect to the Microsoft corporate network from home, employees need to use smartcard authentication. But, somewhat paradoxically, you do better if you remove the smart card. A colleague of mine tipped me off to this. To initiate the connection, you have to insert the smart card and provide the smart card password. Then the system connects to ...

"Worst software ever." That was Aaron Zupancic's cousin's reaction to the fact that Windows XP was incompatible with one program originally designed for Windows 98. Then again, commenter Aargh! says "The bad code should be fixed, period. If it can't be fixed, it breaks, too bad." Perhaps Aargh! can send a message to Aaron's cousin sa...

You can sometimes narrow down the source of a problem just by looking at the screen and moving the mouse. When you move the mouse, the cursor on the screen moves to match. This work is done in the window manager in kernel mode. The mouse hardware notifies the window manager, "Hey, I moved left twenty units." The window manager takes this value, ac...

When doing dithering, one operation you have to do for every pixel is map it (more accurately, map a modified version of it) to the nearest color in your available palette. Since this is part of the dithering inner loop, you need this operation to be as fast as possible.¹ A common technique for this is to precompute the nearest palette index ...