The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
How do I get information about the target of a symbolic link?
Functions like and , when asked to provide information about a symbolic link, returns information about the link itself and not the link destination. If you use the function, you can tell that you have a symbolic link because the file attributes will have the flag set, and the member will contain the special value . Okay, great, so now I know I have a symbolic link, but what if I want information about the link target? For example, I want to know the size of the link target, its last-modified time, and its name. To do this, you open the symbolic link. The I/O manager dereferences the symbolic link and gives...
A sense of the term anonymous with which I had previously been unfamiliar
I was filling out one of those online satisfaction surveys, and in the introduction, it reassured me that This survey is anonymous. The first question on the survey: Enter the support request (SR) number below. Yeah, because they'll never be able to trace the support request number back to me. (I suspect that the reason for this contradiction is that the organization that wanted to conduct the survey used a site that supports either anonymous surveys or tracked surveys, and they opted for the anonymous survey for whatever reason—maybe it's cheaper?—but they actually wanted a tracked survey, so...
Those annoying satisfaction surveys
It seems that the United States has gone satisfaction survey mad. You get your oil changed, they ask you to fill out a satisfaction survey. You make a doctor's appointment, they ask you to fill out a satisfaction survey. You call the company technical support phone line, they ask you to fill out a satisfaction survey. These surveys typically ask you to rate how well various aspects of the interaction went, be it how easy it was to make the appointment, how knowledgeable the person who helped you was, how long you had to wait, whether the music in the waiting room was soothing, and what really bothers me is that ...
No matter what you do, someone will call you an idiot, part 2
There was quite a bit of reaction to what I thought was a simple "Hey, here's what's going on" article from last year, specifically on how the Adaptive Display Timeout means that Windows doesn't always start the screen saver exactly on time. As you may recall, this feature adjusts the time it takes for the screen saver to activate if the user keeps dismissing it immediately after it starts. One of those small things that makes the computer adapt to you rather than vice versa, and an adaptation that you probably don't even notice when it happens. I think these two responses below summarize the extremes of the ty...
Moving by staying put
A few years ago, Michael Kaplan opined on his distaste for office moves, particular the ones for which there appears to be very little benefit. One of his options was "interview with whatever group moves into Building 24 and work for them instead." Many years ago, an organizational change to the project I was working on resulted in my group ceasing to exist. The reason isn't important to the story; what's important is that the members of that group were redeployed to other parts of the project. At the time, I hadn't yet learned that material goods are a burden, and I dreaded moving offices because of all the ...
The 2010/2011 Seattle Symphony subscription season at a glance
Every year, I put together a little pocket guide to the Seattle Symphony subscription season for my symphony friends to help them decide which ticket package they want. As before, you might find it helpful, you might not, but either way, you're going to have to suffer through it. Here's the at-a-glance season guide for Gerard Schwarz's final season as the orchestra's music director. For those not familiar with the Seattle Symphony ticket package line-ups: Most of the ticket packages are named Masterworks nX where the number is the number of concerts in the package, and the letter indicates which variation....
For better performance, set all your monitors to the same color format
Pplu wonders why programs run more slowly when the system is running with multiple monitors. Well, for one thing, of course, when you have more than one monitor, there's more stuff on the screen for the system to keep track of. It's the same reason that programs run more slowly on a large monitor than on a small monitor. And if there's only one monitor, then functions like become trivial if the flag is something like , because when there's only one monitor, answering questions like "What monitor is closest to this point"? becomes very easy. If your two monitors are not the same dimensions, then the union of ...
A simple Venn diagram teaches you the difference between Norway and Sweden
Not sure it helps, though.
Why doesn't my program receive the WM_DWMSENDICONICTHUMBNAIL message when I ask for an iconic representation?
A customer was having trouble adding Windows 7 taskbar integration features to their application: I'm trying to use the new Windows 7 taskbar integration features, but am running into a problem. I've made certain that my program has the and [corrected 8am] attributes set, yet I never receive a message in my window procedure. A member of the taskbar team invoked psychic powers: Is your program running elevated by any chance? If so, then you need to add the message to your UIPI message filter: Psychic powers once again save the day. That was it. Thanks! Note that forcing someone to in...