During the development of Windows 95, as with the development of any project, the people working on the project write side programs to test the features they are adding or to prototype a feature. After Windows 95 shipped, some of those programs were collected into the first edition of the Windows 95 Power Toys. As I recall, the fir...

To detect programmatically whether your 32-bit program is running on 64-bit Windows, you can use the IsWow64Process function. Do not do as some people do and hard-code the list of 64-bit processors. You'd think that after the hard-coded list of 64-bit processors changed the first time (when x64 was added to ia64), people would have learned thei...

Over on Channel 9, member Beer28 wrote, "I can't imagine there are too many problems with programs that have type widths changed." I got a good chuckle out of that and made a note to write up an entry on the Win64 data model. The Win64 team selected the LLP64 data model, in which all integral types remain 32-bit values and only pointers ex...

Sometimes people go to great lengths to get information which is available in a much simpler way. We saw it a few days ago when we found a 200+-line C# program that could be replaced with a 90-byte batch file. Here's another example of a rather roundabout way of capturing the current directory from a batch file. The easy way is to use the pse...

By default, the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) which is used by Automatic Updates will use idle network bandwidth for downloading updates. This is normally not a problem. One case where it can be a problem is you have a large LAN that shares a single DSL connection. BITS doesn't see that that DSL connection is shared. Consequently,...

In a previous life, I wrote database software. A customer complained that one of their reports was taking an unacceptably long amount of time to generate, and I was asked to take a look at it even though it wasn't my account. The report was a vacation-days report, listing the number of vacation days taken and available for each employee. Vacati...

If you have a file or directory that does not have a last-modified date, you may find that it causes Explorer to sort very strangely. (How do you get a file or directory with no last-modifiied date? It's hard to do; you need the help of an external file system.) Why is this? As we learned earlier, a sort comparison function must impose a total or...

The CMD.EXE batch language can be awfully cryptic, but for those who miss the richness of command lines like or bursts of line noise masquerading as a pipeline of "find", "sed", and "awk" processes, Microsoft Windows Services for Unix is available for free download.

Right on schedule, Alton Brown appeared at the Elliot Bay Book Company bookstore in downtown Seattle. One of my friends wondered aloud, "Wait a second, he's promoting his cookbook. How do you do a reading from a cookbook?" He didn't read from his cookbook. To an overflow crowd that probably violated a few fire codes, Alton Brown discussed what...

Not very well known is that the bottom two bits of kernel HANDLEs are always zero; in other words, their numeric value is always a multiple of 4. Note that this applies only to kernel HANDLEs; it does not apply to pseudo-handles or to any other type of handle (USER handles, GDI handles, multimedia handles...) Kernel handles are things you can pas...