Have you checked out AMD's ads for their AMD Athlon 64 FX processor? The copy reads, "My adrenalin fix isn't what it used to be. Double the dose. AMD me." And it has a picture of a tough-looking guy glaring at the camera, challenging the reader to do their worst. But take a look at what's on his screen. It's a giant command window. Now look a...

I've been tinkering with the look of the comments section, based on initial feedback. Took me a while but I think I found something that works pretty well.

In a comment, somebody asked what the deal was with the unsafe device removal dialog in Windows 2000 and why it's gone in Windows XP. I wasn't involved with that dialog, but here's what I remember: The device was indeed removed unsafely. If it was a USB storage device, for example, there may have been unflushed I/O buffers. If it were a printer, t...

Hey folks, this blog is moving to a new home. It'll take me a while to set up shop there, though, so please be patient. Some time after the new year, the content will likely migrate to the new location.

Hey there, everybody. It's going to take me a while to settle in, so please be patient. It seems I always celebrate a new blog by designing some insane multi-part series on some obscure aspect of Win32, so I think I'll welcome this site with a series of articles that demonstrate various things you can do with the shell namespace. I haven't planned ...

Wenn Teenies shoppen gehen: Flugzeuge im Warenkorb. This article caught my eye because it opens with a German slang phrase I learned just a few weeks ago: "Tote Hose" which means roughly "Absolutely nothing doing". Here's an English version of the article for those whose German isn't quite up to snuff. ...

You may have noticed that Windows as a general rule checks structure sizes strictly. For example, consider the MENUITEMINFO structure: Notice that the size of this structure changes depending on whether WINVER >= 0x0500 (i.e., whether you are targetting Windows 2000 or higher). If you take the Windows 2000 version of this structure and pass ...

Slashdot's story about the amateur adventurer who is now stranded at McMurdo Base (because he underestimated his fuel requirements for a trip over the South Pole) reminded me of a controversy abrew at the other end of the planet: The hole at the North Pole. To resolve this matter, Steve Currey i...

As we discussed yesterday, if you need to pass more than 32767 characters of information to a child process, you'll have to use something other than the command line. One method is to wait for the child process to go input idle, then for some agreed-upon window and send it a message. This method has a few problems: You have to come up with...

It depends on whom you ask. The maximum command line length for the CreateProcess function is 32767 characters. This limitation comes from the UNICODE_STRING structure. CreateProcess is the core function for creating processes, so if you are talking directly to Win32, then that's the only limit you have to worry about. But if you are reaching Cr...