The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Improving the performance of CF_HDROP by providing file attribute information
The clipboard format is still quite popular, despite its limitation of being limited to files. You can't use it to represent virtual content, for example. For all of you still using , you can improve the performance of drag/drop operations by adding a little more information to your data object. Observe that the clipboard format is just a list of paths. Some drop targets care about whether the paths refer to directories or to files, and since does not provide this information, the drop targets are forced to access the disk to get the answer. (This can be expensive for network locations.) To help this c...
Link-time code generation invalidates a lot of classical assumptions about linking
It goes beyond special relativity, beyond general relativity... into TIME TRAVEL.
Closing over the loop variable is just as harmful in JavaScript as it is in C#, and more cumbersome to fix
Prerequisite reading: Closing over the loop variable considered harmful. JavaScript has the same problem. Consider: The most common case where you encounter this is when you are hooking up event handlers in a loop, so that's the case I used as an example. No matter which button you click, they all alert , rather than the respective button number. The reason for this is given in the prerequisite reading: You closed over the loop variable, so by the time the function actually executed, the variable had the value , since that's the leftover value after the loop is complete. The cumbersome part is fixing...
Why did it take so long for Windows to support a taskbar on more than one monitor?
Mark wants to know why Windows has never supported having a taskbar on more than one monitor. (The question was asked before Windows 8 multi-monitor taskbar support became publically-known.) The feature has always been on the list, but it's a long list, and specifically the cost of designing, implementing, testing, performing usability tests, then redesigning the feature (because you will definitely need to redesign something as significant as this at least once) historically prevented it from escaping the minus-100-point deficit. Features do not exist in a vacuum, and decisions about features necessaril...
As long as your file names meet operating system requirements, you can use whatever you like; the rest is up to you
A customer had a question about the MSDN documentation on rules for legal file names: My employees keep naming documents with hyphens in the name. For example, they might name a file . It is my position that hyphens should not be used in this way, and the document should be named . Please advise on the use of hyphens within file names. Hyphens inside file names are legal, and you can use as many as you like, subject to the other rules for file names. If you are having an argument with your employees about file naming conventions, that's something you just need to work out among yourselves. Whatever you decid...
Obtaining information about the user's wallpaper on multiple monitors
Today we're going to dump information about the user's wallpaper settings on multiple monitors. The idea is simple. You use the interface on the object to get information about the desktop wallpaper. It will tell you the wallpaper positioning information, whether a single image is being used for all monitors, where those monitors are, and which image is on which monitor. The program proceeds in a few basic steps. We create the object. That object will give us the answers to our questions. Our first question is, "Is the same wallpaper being shown on all monitors?" To determine that, we call and speci...
Why does GetFileVersionInfo map the whole image into memory instead of just parsing out the pieces it needs?
Commenter acq responds (with expletive deleted), "the whole file is mapped into the process' memory only for version info that's certainly only a few kilobytes to be read?" Why not map only the parts that are needed? "I don't understand the necessity to map the whole file except that it was easier to write that code without thinking too much." That was exactly the reason. But not because it was to avoid thinking. It was to make things more secure. Back in the old days, the function did exactly what acq suggested: It parsed the executable file format manually looking for the file version information. (In other ...
Get your hex wrench ready, because here comes the Ikea bicycle
Ikea säljer elcyklar. Click through for two-image slide show. Ikea selling electric bicycles Forget furniture. Ikea is now launching, that's right, an electric bicycle. It goes under the name People-Friendly and costs around 6000 SEK ($900 USD). But only in Älmhult, Småland. People-Friendly has already received three design awards, including the IF Design Award, according to Ikea's press release. What distinguishes it from other electric bicycles is that the battery is hidden in the frame. That makes it look like a regular bicycle as well as lowering the center of gravity and makes t...
It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway: Denial of service by high CPU usage
You already can do that without doing anything sneaky.