The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Creating a listview with checkboxes on some items but not others
Today's Little Program creates a listview with checkboxes on some items but not other. The extended style is really just a convenience style. Everything it ...
How do I manually recalculate ACLs on a file based on the containing directory?
A customer wanted to move a file and have it forget all its old ACLs and instead inherit its ACLs from its new location. They found an old article of mine ...
Can you dllexport/dllimport an inline function?
Yes, but it won't actually do much.
The case of the missing context menu verbs
A customer reported that when they right-clicked a batch file, a bunch of commands were missing. For example, Open was gone! Okay, there really isn't much of a...
The case of the mysterious Alternate Data Stream query
A customer was running Windows Server 2003 ("Still in support until 2015!") and they have some custom application that monitors all disk accesses. They noticed ...
Excuses college students use for missing assignments
My father recently retired after over 40 years as a college professor. During that time, he has seen all sorts of lame excuses students offer for missing ...
How do I obtain the computer manufacturer's name via C++?
The way to get the computer manufacturer and other information is to ask WMI. WMI is much easier to use via scripting, but maybe you want to do it from C++. ...
What happened in real-mode Windows when somebody did a longjmp into a discardable segment?
During the discussion of how real-mode Windows handled return addresses into discarded segments, Gabe wondered, "What happens when somebody does a into a ...
If the cursor clip rectangle is a global resource, how come I can't change it with ClipCursor?
A customer reported that the function was not working. "The cursor clip rectangle is a shared global resource, so I should be able to change it any time I like...