The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
I dreamed that I was in an alternate-universe Samuel L. Jackson movie
I dreamed that I was part of the crew of an underwater spaceship, and we had to deal with an alligator that got on board. How the alligator got on board was never explained, but now is not the time to ask questions because, you know, alligator. The plan was to flood the ship and wash the alligator out. There were only enough air pills for the female crew members. The men would have to hold their breath and hope for the best, with the expectation that not all would make it. But before we could execute the plan, the door caved in and the ship began to fill with water. At this point, I transferred to another dream...
Providing a custom autocomplete source for an edit control
Today's Little Program shows a custom source for autocomplete. It's nothing exciting, but at least's it's something you can use as a starting point for your own customizations. We start with a dialog template, whose edit control will be the target of a custom autocomplete. Just for fun, I wrote the program in ATL. Instead of complaining that my code is hard to understand because I didn't use an application framework, people can now complain that my code is hard to understand because I used the wrong application framework. To save some typing, I define a shorthand name for "the predefined ATL object for e...
How can I tell that I have a shell folder that represents My Computer?
You have in your hands an , and you want to know whether this is an that represents My Computer. There are a few ideas that may occur to you. One is to ask the folder for its current location and compare it to . Okay, we have a lot of moving parts here. Let's look at them one at a time. The function takes an object and asks what folder it represents. Since we don't actually use any methods on the object beyond what is provided by , we weaken the parameter requirement to simply . The function compares two absolute ID lists according to the criteria specified by the . The combines these two function: It...
Raymond's subjective, biased, unfair, and completely wrong characterization of the sounds of several East Asian (and one Southeast Asian) languages
Hokkien: This is the language I learned first, so to me it sounds perfectly normal and is in fact how languages should sound. I find it odd that people describe it as one of the more difficult languages to learn. I mean, sure it has a large tone repertoire (eight theoretical, though only seven in practice) and extensive tone sandhi, but that's what makes it beautiful and smooth. And what's so hard about having unvoiced aspirated consonants, unvoiced unaspirated consonants, and voiced consonants? Mandarin: Mandarin is the German of East Asian languages: It is harsh and unforgiving. There are only four formal ton...
When a program is launched via DDE, and there are multiple servers, which one is used?
Although you are more than welcome to stop using DDE (please oh please stop using it), there are still many applications which still use it (cough), and as a result, customers still have questions about it. One customer wanted to know why, if multiple copies of a DDE-based application are running, Windows 7 will send the command to the earliest-launched copy of the program, whereas Windows XP will send the command to the most-recently-used copy. "Our employees were used to forcing the document to open in a specific window by switching to that window, thereby making it most-recently-used, then switchin...
SubtractRect doesn't always give you the exact difference
The function takes a source rectangle and subtracts out the portion which intersects a second rectangle, returning the result in a third rectangle. But wait a second, the result of subtracting one rectangle from another need not be another rectangle. It might be an L-shape, or it might be a rectangle with a rectangular hole. How does this map back to a rectangle? The documentation for says that the function performs the subtraction when they "intersect completely in either the x- or y-direction." But I prefer to think of it as the alternate formulation offered in the documentation: "In other words, the resul...
Facilities jargon: Energize
Over in the product engineering groups, we aren't often exposed to the jargon employed by our Facilities group. But once in a while, it leaks through and then we get to puzzle it out. Emergency Electrical Outage and Restoral Due to a transformer failure, power to building NNN was shut down from 6:00am to 6:30am on MMMM-DD. Occupants may need to re-energize their office equipment. From what we can gather, re-energize is just a fancy way of saying turn on. Bonus jargon: Restoral.
Entering the world of competitive Ring-Around-the-Rosie
I dreamed that a friend and I were in line at some sort of summer camp to get into the cafeteria. We noticed a glass cabinet with food out in the dining area and asked about it. Turns out that it was available for people to eat, as an alternative to standing in line. We decided to go for it. (Another example of how being lucky is observing what you weren't expecting.) The plates on top of the cabinet were nearly empty, but it never occurred to anybody to open the cabinet door to get the food inside. We opened the door and moved food to the top of the cabinet, as a crowd slowly formed as people noticed, "Hey, lo...
Forcing a file handle closed when it has been opened remotely
Today's Little Program closes a file handle that was opened remotely. It builds on previous discussion on how to use the functions. Forcing a network file handle closed does not actually close the handle. This makes it very different from the various "force handle closed" utilities out there. Rather, forcing a network file handle closed is accomplished by simulating a network failure, so that when the remote machine tries to use the handle again, it's told, "Wha? I'm sorry, we must have a bad connection, because I'm not sure what you're talking about." Since programs which access network resources must dea...