Showing results for Code - The Old New Thing

Let's go straight to the question: I have two programs that take turns doing something. Right now, I manage the hand-off with two auto-reset events. In Thread A, after it finishes doing some work, it signals Event B and then immediately waits on Event A. Thread B does the converse: When its wait on Event B completes, it...

A customer wanted to know whether a shell extension can control the order of the property sheet pages in a property sheet. The interface lets you add pages and replace pages, but nothing about rearranging them. Naturally a shell extension can control the relative order of its own pages (by changing in the order in which it calls ) but how can it...

The documentation for the function mentions GCL_CB­CLS­EXTRA: Sets the size, in bytes, of the extra memory associated with the class. Setting this value does not change the number of extra bytes already allocated. What's the point of letting the application change a value if it has no effect? The class long grants access to the v...

Say you opened a file in synchronous mode, and then you realize that you want to issue asynchronous I/O on it, too. One way to do this is to call a second time with the , but this requires you to know the file name, and the file name may not be readily available to the function that wants to do the conversion, or it may not even be valid any long...

We saw some time ago that before invoking a method on an object, the CLR will generate a instruction to force a null reference exception to be raised if you are trying to invoke a method on a null reference. But why does the CLR raise a if the faulting address is almost but not quite zero? When run, this program raises a rather than an . ...

Don't worry. Our long national nightmare of CLR week is almost over. I had originally planned to write an article about partially-constructed objects, but in the time since I queued up the topic (back in November 2005) to the time I got around to writing it up, I found that Joe Duffy had already written it for me! On partially-constructed ob...

The class lets you retain a reference to an object while still permitting the object to be garbage collected. When that happens, then the property is and the property is . (Related discussion.) Note, however, that weak references do not alter the decision of the garbage collector whether or not an object is garbage. It merely lets you observe ...

If a parameter to a C# method is declared with the keyword, then it can match either itself or a comma-separated list of um itselves(?). Consider: This program prints The first call to does not take advantage of the keyword and passes the array explicitly (formally known as normal form). The second call, however, specifies the integers d...

Welcome to CLR Week 2013, returned from its two-year hiatus. A customer reported that when they checked with the debugger, reported even though they were running on an x86 machine, which is a little-endian architecture. The bytes are extracted in little-endian order, despite the claim that the machine is big-endian. "I don't get it." I d...

Disabling autorepeat in my ABC program was largely sufficient to keep my nieces happy, given their instructions to press only one key at a time. Once in a while, though, they would hit the context menu key in the bottom right corner of the keyboard, and then they'd get stuck because they didn't know how to dismiss it. So let's disable that key ...