The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Why doesn't the New Folder command work in the root of a redirected drive resource in a Remote Desktop session?
When you connect to another computer via Remote Desktop, you have the option of injecting your local drives into the remote computer, known as Device and Resource Redirection. These injected drives are available under the UNC where X is a drive letter on the local machine. The name combines a bunch of internal technical terminology, so it makes perfect sense to the people who wrote it, but not as much to outsiders. (They may have chosen this name just to make themselves look smart.) The letters TS stand for Terminal Services, which was the former name of the technology now known as Remote Desktop. And the wo...
That fee was so that we wouldn't have to raise our prices
I dreamed that I got screwed by Ticketmaster. I was relieved when I woke up and found out it was only a dream. Bonus chatter: The economics of Ticketmaster. It reminds me of a company who added a service fee to an existing rate plan, and in their FAQ for the service fee, they explained, "That fee was so that we wouldn't have to raise our prices." This is some sort of bizarro-world logic. Yes, I know that this is so that the company can continue to advertise an artifically low "price" in all their marketing materials, and then make up the difference by tacking on a boatload of fees. A colleague of mine was pu...
Disabling the PrtSc key by blocking input
A customer asked how to disable the PrtSc key in the On-Screen Keyboard. There is no way to disable the PrtSc key in the On-Screen Keyboard. The On-Screen Keyboard shows a keyboard, and you can click any virtual key you like. There is no policy to remove specific keys from the On-Screen Keyboard. But this was a case of a customer breaking down a problem and asking a question about a specific part of the problem instead of presenting the entire problem so that a solution to the overall problem could be developed. The customer's real goal was to disable the PrtSc key in general. They had figured out how to d...
Turning off the disco lights on the Start screen
Blinky blinky.
How do you intercept taskbar notification balloons?
A customer wanted to know how they could monitor and intercept taskbar notification balloons. In particular, they wanted to intercept the clicks on a particular balloon and take alternative action. There is no supported mechanism for intercepting taskbar notification balloons or redirecting clicks on them. Imagine if that were possible: Fabrikam would intercept notification balloons for Contoso. If they had access to the balloon text itself, they might change the message from "Contoso products are back in stock. Click here to place your order." to "Special offer for Contoso customers: Take 10% off your first or...
Some vice presidents forget that not everybody attends the same meetings that they do
There are some vice presidents who forget that not everybody attends the same meetings that they do. When they send email to the entire division, they use buzzwords and acronyms that are not widely-understood. For example, they may mention the great progress that the Nosebleed team is making with DOXLA,¹ but that doesn't mean much to people who aren't on the Nosebleed team. Meanwhile, the people on the Nosebleed team probably don't know what the vice president is talking about when they compliment the Bunion team's recent breakthough in MT1 alignment.¹ When that happens, I like to send email back to t...
Mysterious email, possible social engineering, whatever it was, it didn't work
A colleague of mine got a strange piece of email. It went something like this, although I've substituted a fictitious nation and fictitious company name to protect the guilty(?). Subject: St. George's Island Embassy Trade Mission: Meeting request on behalf of Contoso Corporation Dear ⟨name⟩, I am contacting you following the advice of ⟨senior executive⟩, CTO of Microsoft Pangaea. The St. George's Island Embassy Trade Mission is currently assisting a local company, Contoso. Contoso would like to present ⟨technology⟩ to Microsoft. Details are in the attached document. Would...
This was only a test; if this had been an actual concert…
I dreamed that there was a fire in Benaroya Hall during a concert. The flames swirled overhead up by the ceiling. The exit doors had been blocked by security, so people flowed from door to door looking for a way out. Ha-ha, it was just a drill, and the flames were pyrotechnics. This dream brought to you by Great Ideas in Public Safety.
Destroying all child processes (and grandchildren) when the parent exits
Today's Little Program launches a child process and then just hangs around. If you terminate the parent process, then all the children (and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, you get the idea) are also terminated. The tool for this is the Job Object. Specifically, we mark the job as "kill on job close" which causes all processes in the job to be terminated when the last handle to the job is closed. We must therefore be careful not to allow this handle to be inherited, because that would create another handle that needs to be closed before the job is terminated. And of course we need to be careful not to...