The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
It’s that season again: The Microsoft Company Meeting
Today is the 2006 Microsoft Company Meeting, and with it the continuation of what I consider to be one of the most annoying Company Meeting traditions: The group that cheers wildly any time their project name is mentioned. It's never the same group year to year. Instead, a different group (or groups) independent decides to be the annoying one for any particular meeting. For illustrative purposes, let's call the 2006 group "Project Nosebleed". (All project names in this entry are fictitious and are used solely for illustrative purposes. Any similarity to actual projects is purely coincidental. But I mean, really,...
If you don't trust your administrators, you've already lost
Occasionally, a customer will ask for a way they can restrict what the administrator can do. The short answer to this is, "Um, no, that's why they're called 'Administrator'." You can try to set up roadblocks, say, ACL files to revoke access to a file you don't want the administrator to read, but the Administrator can always take ownership of the file and read the contents that way. At the end of the day, the Administrator owns the local machine. Often, people ask this question because they want to grant certain employees selected subsets of the full set of capabilities available to the Administrator. The way to ...
It is as if our leaders have not been educated in orbital space colonization
Yesterday were held the primary elections in the state of Washington. Most of the partisan positions were uncontested, so there wasn't much to research. The one with the most candidates was for one of the state's Senate seats, and among those candidates were some who might be considered "a bit unorthodox". None of these candidates appears to have won their respective election, so we won't be seeing much more of them this election season. But that's okay. All four of these candidates are "regulars" on the ballot, so they'll almost certainly be back in two years if not sooner.
Don’t forget to unregister your window classes when your DLL shuts down dynamically
You can get strange errors otherwise.
The tale of the radioactive Boy Scout
Under no circumstances should you attempt this at home.
Why doesn't the Shutdown dialog use Alt to get alternate behavior?
When you select "Shut Down" from the Start menu, a dialog appears with three options: "Stand By", "Turn Off" and "Restart". To get the secret fourth option "Hibernate" you have to press the shift key. Would the Alt key be the more obvious choice for revealing alternate options? You might think so, but it so happens that Alt already has meaning. In this dialog, the Alt key would be a disaster, because the underlined letters indicate keyboard accelerators, which are pressed in conjunction with the Alt key. In other words, from the Shut Down dialog, you can type Alt+S to stand by, Alt+U to turn off, or Alt+R to res...
Project Update 2: Voyage to Our Hollow Earth
If everything went according to plan, the trip to the hole in the Arctic Ocean should have completed a few months ago. I went to the web site to see what they found, only to discover that it's been postponed another year, to June 26, 2007. This is clearly the handiwork of the world government attempting to suppress the release of information they have all held in secret for decades. All their attempts to prevent the discovery of the polar opening only serves to confirm its existence!
Sometimes my psychic powers are weak
Why does my MFC program exit unexpectedly? The stack trace at the point we hit goes like this: Thanks. You can already see some of what's going on, but clearly more information is needed. My first psychic suggestion was to examine MFC's message pump to see what causes it to exit. Then follow the money backwards. That's what we want to know and what we want to find out. MFC comes with source code so you can do this yourself. Don't expect somebody to do your debugging for you. You have the tools to do it yourself: You have the source code and you have a brain. Once you figure out what conditions make...
Disaster averted, thanks to international time zones
Boy, the world has been really lucky this year. After successfully avoiding a massive tsunami in the Atlantic Ocean, the world narrowly escaped global disaster as predicted by Yisrayl Hawkins, leader of the organization The House of Yahweh. What saved us? Well, I'll let Mosheh Sang, leader of the organization in Kenya, explain: According to Sang, a nuclear war between the US and North Korea only failed to kick off Tuesday as expected due to difference in international time zones. But they're not giving up yet. According to another leader, Eleazor Kamotho Mugwe: It can take up to seven years from now for t...