Because the program isn't actually corrupted. Sort of.

The and functions allow you to specify whether you want to want for any or all of the handles (either by passing or by passing , accordingly). But you never want to wait for all handles. Waiting for all handles means that the call does not return unless all the handles are signalled and a window message meeting your wake criteria has arrived. S...

Stephen Tolouse (known around Microsoft as "stepto", pronounced "step-toe") from the Microsoft Security Response Center reminisces about Windows 95 RTM. Stephen mentions that "the build numbers were artificially inflated to reach 950". There's actually a technical reason for this inflation, which I intend to write about when I have the time to ...

We can use the function (or its superset ) to carry out a non-polling "sleep while processing messages". This function pumps messages for up to milliseconds. The kernel of the idea is merely to use the function as a surrogate for , pumping messages until the cumulative timeout has been reached. There are a lot of small details to pay heed to...

Vancouver technologist Darren Barefoot was invited to Redmond by the MSN Search team but was stopped by Immigration and denied entry. Ultimately, the customs agents concluded that because Microsoft was covering my flight and accommodation, I was being compensated for consulting activities. In order to enter the country, I'd need a work permit. ...

There is no function, but you can create your own with the assistance of the function. To wait for a message with timeout, we use the in a vacuous sense: You pass it a list of objects you want to wait for, as well as a timeout and a set of queue states, asking that the function return when any of the objects is signalled or when a message is...

Heather Leigh had a creepy experience with her baggage last week. The story continued yesterday. I'm watching to see how things turn out.

Polling kills. A program should not poll as a matter of course. Doing so can have serious consequences on system performance. It's like checking your watch every minute to see if it's 3 o'clock yet instead of just setting an alarm. First of all, polling means that a small amount of CPU time gets eaten up at each poll even though there is nothing ...

Many commenters to my earlier entry on sales in France had questions about rebates. Slate explained the whole rebate thing back in 2003. The short version: There are two types of rebates, manufacturer rebates and retailer rebates. Manufacturer rebates exist because they want the retail price to go down, but they are afraid that if they just lowe...

There are many cases where a callback function is allowed to halt an operation. For example, you might decide to return to the message to prevent the window from being created, or you might decide to return to one of the many enumeration callback functions such as the callback. When you do this, the enclosing operation will return failure bac...