The method described in the previous coding blog entry works great if you are using the window visibility state to control painting, since you're using the paint system itself to do the heavy lifting for you. To obtain this information outside of the paint loop, use and . The HDC that...

The White House is doing some renovating of its own (NYT, free registration required), in order to refurbish a section of the lawn that is used by television reporters so they can stand there with a nice picture of the White House behind them. But that's not why I found this story interesting. Go about halfway down the article: "The light and ...

Researchers have determined that living in the suburbs makes you fat. That and all the super-sized value meals. Speaking of super-sizing your value meal: people are tearing down their McMansions in order to build... a bigger McMansion (WSJ, paid registration required, sorry...

The problem with displaying UI is that people will take every opportunity to ignore it. This story of how people deal with virus warning dialogs (via Don Browning) is a template for how users treat any unexpected dialog: They try to get rid of it. We see this time and time again. If ...

When you try to install a patch, you may get the error message "Setup could not verify integrity of file. Make sure the cryptographic service is running." This typically means that the signature catalog has been corrupted. There was a patch to fix this problem, but of course if you haven't ...

Sometimes you want to perform an activity, such as updating a status window, only as long as the window is not covered by another window. The easiest way to determine this is by not actually trying to determine it. For example, here's how the taskbar clock updates itself...

Backwards compatibility applies not only to software. It also applies to hardware. And when hardware goes bad, the software usually takes the blame. The HLT instruction tells the CPU to shut itself down until the next hardware interrupt. This is a big win on laptops since it reduces power consumption...

I get called on frequently to do troubleshooting, so I figure I'd share some entries from my private bag of tricks.  (And there are some remarks for programmers hidden here too.) Problem 1. A folder like opens each time you log on. Reason: Your system contains two ...

This is where Windows keeps the files that you have marked for being available offline.  (CSC was the working name for the feature now called Offline Files. It stands for Client-Side Caching...

Windows XP ships with a number of icon overlays. The black clock is particularly baffling because you sometimes see it even if your system is not equipped with Hierarchical Storage Management. When this happens, it's because some program (...