Showing results for Code - The Old New Thing

Instead of a Little Program today, I'm going to answer a Little Question. This is a common beginner question, but I figure I'll just spell it out right here for posterity. First of all, you probably noticed that you can't do this: That's because the is declared as a so-called free function, but member functions are not free. Neither are func...

A programmer on the GHI team reported that they were hitting an assertion failure using an internal library and asked for help debugging it. I didn't work on this internal library, but on the other hand I'm also not afraid to look inside and around. The assertion failure said, "Assertion failed: All widgets from a factory must be destroyed be...

The structure has a field called which is a . There is also a function which returns a . Both are documented as returning the time the message was generated, but the types are different. Are these time units comparable? Yes, they are the same thing. They all use the 32-bit timer provided by the function. Sorry about the inconsistency in sign...

Jumbo size.

The second parameter to the is an optional window handle that is used to tell the function to retrieve only messages that belong to the specified window. A filtered is nearly always a bad idea, because your program will not respond to messages that don't meet the filter. Unlike a filtered (which simply returns "no messages satisfy the filter...

Remember octal? I don't.

Today's Little Program creates a listview with checkboxes on some items but not other. The extended style is really just a convenience style. Everything it does you could have done yourself, with a bit more typing. It creates a state image list consisting of an unchecked box (state 1) and a checked box (state 2). You could have done t...

A customer wanted to move a file and have it forget all its old ACLs and instead inherit its ACLs from its new location. They found an old article of mine that said If you use to move a file and pass the flag, then it will not preserve the original ACLs on the moved files but will rather recalculate them from the destination's inheritable prop...

Yes, but it won't actually do much.

A customer reported that when they right-clicked a batch file, a bunch of commands were missing. For example, Open was gone! Okay, there really isn't much of a story here, because some direct debugging quickly identified the culprit. The customer had installed a third party shell extension which returned a huge value from its method. Explorer t...