The Old New Thing

Be careful when redirecting both a process’s stdin and stdout to pipes, for you can easily deadlock

July 7, 2011 Jul 7, 2011 07/7/11

Raymond Chen

Pipe in, pipe out.

The historical struggle over control of the Portuguese language

July 6, 2011 Jul 6, 2011 07/6/11

Raymond Chen

Portugal has been going through a rough patch. Its international stature has diminished over the years, its economy has always struggled to remain competitive, the government had to accept a bailout to avoid defaulting on its debt, and on top of it all, it is losing control of its own language. In Portugal, the latest round of Portuguese ...

Looking at the problem at the wrong level: Closing a process's stdin

July 6, 2011 Jul 6, 2011 07/6/11

Raymond Chen

A customer was having trouble manipulating the stdin stream that was given to a process. How do you simulate sending Ctrl+Z to a hidden console process programmatically? I am using and want to send the console a Ctrl+Z. I've tried sending ASCII code 26, but that doesn't work. supports Ctrl+C and Ctrl+Break but not Ctrl+Z. Here's what...

Microspeak: Reporting through

July 5, 2011 Jul 5, 2011 07/5/11

Raymond Chen

I'll start with the citation from a hypothetical conversation: "This is being handled by Jonathan Swift." — Who does he report through? "He reports up through Jane Austen's org." The Microspeak term report through (or report up through) comes up often in situations where people from different groups are working together. In its ...

A handful of trips through the time machine

July 4, 2011 Jul 4, 2011 07/4/11

Raymond Chen

A few trips through the time machine: In the Internet Explorer time machine video, I was struck by the remark, "Appearance-wise, very little had changed [in Internet Explorer 4] since IE3. Not much changed in terms of functionality, either." In fact, Internet Explorer 4 was probably the most significant revision of Internet Explorer in...

The list of heaps returned by GetProcessHeaps is valid when it returns, but who knows what happens later

July 1, 2011 Jul 1, 2011 07/1/11

Raymond Chen

A customer had a problem involving heap corruption. In our code, we call and then for each heap, we call to enable the low fragmentation heap. However, the application crashes due to an invalid heap handle. My question is, why do we need to allocate an array of size 1025 even though we pass 1024 to ? Ha, faked you out with that ...

2011 mid-year link clearance

June 30, 2011 Jun 30, 2011 06/30/11

Raymond Chen

Another round of the semi-annual link clearance. And, as always, the obligatory plug for my column in TechNet Magazine...

The UseUrl attribute in the App Paths key indicates that your application can accept a URL on the command line

June 30, 2011 Jun 30, 2011 06/30/11

Raymond Chen

Setting the attribute in your key indicates that your application can accept a URL on the command line as the document to be opened. The documentation for this attribute is a confusing blend of raw documentation, guidance, history, and an example. Let's tease the parts apart so you won't confuse the example with the contract. The raw ...

What happens to WPARAM, LPARAM, and LRESULT when they travel between 32-bit and 64-bit windows?

June 29, 2011 Jun 29, 2011 06/29/11

Raymond Chen

The integral types , , and are 32 bits wide on 32-bit systems and 64 bits wide on 64-bit systems. What happens when a 32-bit process sends a message to a 64-bit window or vice versa? There's really only one choice when converting a 64-bit value to a 32-bit value: Truncation. When a 64-bit process sends a message to a 32-bit window, the 64-...

A different way to win from one of those claw game

June 28, 2011 Jun 28, 2011 06/28/11

Raymond Chen

I know two people (siblings) who are experts at those claw games. They can look at a claw game, assess the situation, decide whether there is a winnable toy, and if so, drop in their quarter and grab it. I asked the elder sibling how they arrived at this amazing skill. "As a teenager, I spent something like $20 pumping quarters into one of ...