Windows Management Instrumentation is a scriptable interface to configuration information. This saves you the trouble of having to figure it out yourself. For example, here's a little program that enumerates all the CPUs in your system and prints some basic information about them. var locator = WScript.CreateObject("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator...

When you register your program with a file association, the shell needs to decide whether your program supports long file names so it can decide whether to pass you the long name (which may contains spaces! so make sure you put quotation marks around the "%1" in your registration) or the short name. The rule is simple: The shell looks at your pr...

The Listview control when placed in report mode has a child header control which it uses to display column header titles. This header control is the property of the listview, but the listview is kind enough to let you retrieve the handle to that header control. And some programs abuse that kindness. It so happens that the original listview...

Another question people ask is "How do I do triple-click or higher?" Once you see the algorithm for double-clicks, extending it to higher order clicks should be fairly natural. The first thing you probably should do is to remove the CS_DBLCLKS style from your class because you want to do multiple-click management manually. Next, you can simply...

First, I'm going to refer you to the MSDN documentation on mouse clicks, since that's the starting point. I'm going to assume that you know the mechanics of how single-clicks are converted to double-clicks. Okay, now that you've read it, let's talk about some logical consequences of that article and what it means for the way you design your use...

Molten rock makes volcano glow red, reports CNN. Amazing the things you can learn from the news. Last year we learned that concrete is stronger once it has hardened.

Some people smarter than me have been working on this problem, and here's what they figured out. First, I'll just reprint their analysis (so that people with the problem and are searching for the solution can find it), and then we can discuss it. Update (18 October 2005): The official version of this document is now available. Please use that ...

Okay, I got around to digging through the suggestion box, and today I'm going to dispatch the items that don't require much thought but seemed worthy of reply to some degree. You won't learn much of anything today. Other entries require more thought. Each non-code entry takes me a half hour or so, more if I have to do research (if somebody as...

Philip Su's discussion of early versions of Microsoft Money triggered a topic that had been sitting in the back of my mind for a while: That people lie on surveys and focus groups, often unwittingly. I can think of three types of lies offhand. (I'm not counting malicious lying; that is, intentional lying for the purpose of undermining the results...

The and functions return an What is that good for? The names of all registered window classes is kept in an atom table internal to USER32. The value returned by the class registration functions is that atom. You can also retrieve the atom for a window class by asking a window of that class for its class atom via . The atom can be convert...