Advanced Query Syntax to the rescue.
The parsing name for a shell item is handy, because it lets you regenerate the item later. Actually, the pidl for the shell item is even better, because that is the official way of saving and restoring objects. It's the pidl that gets saved in a shortcut, and since shortcuts can be copied around from machine to machine, pidls must be transportable...
A customer was having trouble with their IContextMenu implementation. They observed that their IContextMenu::QueryContextMenu method was being called, but when the user selected their menu item, IContextMenu::InvokeCommand was not being called. Given what you know about shell context menus, you can already direct th...
A customer asked, "Which is faster for copying data from one process to another; or ?" This is one of those "Huh?"-type questions, where the customer has solved half of a problem and is looking for help with the other half, the half that makes no sense. First of all, the question is malformed because does not copy any data at all. It takes e...
A customer had a program that was corrupting the managed heap by p/invoking incorrectly. The problem didn't show up until the next garbage collection pass, at which point the CLR got all freaked-out-like. "According to Knowledge Base article 286470, the tool is supposed to catch heap corruption, but it doesn't catch squat." Depending on your po...
Today's "Little Program" does two things: It looks for a printer in the Printers folder, and then once it finds it, it creates a shortcut to that printer. As is common with "Little Programs", I don't bother with error checking. I'll leave you to do that. Second part first, since it is handy on its own: Creating a shortcut to an arbitrary item ...
A customer had a problem with SAFEARRAY, or more specifically, with CComSafeArray. CComSafeArray<VARIANT> sa; GetAwesomeArray(&sa); LONG lb = sa.GetLowerBound(); LONG ub = sa.GetUpperBound(); for (LONG i = lb; i <= ub; i++) { CComVariant item = sa.GetAt(i); ... use the item ... } The GetAt method returns a VARIANT&, and wh...
Starting with the Windows Vista PlatformSDK, defining the symbol before including shell header files changes declarations that previously had simply used now use one of various types which are more clear about what type of ID list is being used. Think of it as the macro for the shell. The more precise names emphasize the form of the ID lis...
At least as of the time this article was originally written, the HTML clipboard format is officially at version 0.9. A customer observed that sometimes they received HTML clipboard data that marked itself as version 1.0 and wanted to know where they could find documentation on that version. As far as I can tell, there is no official version 1.0...
A developer from another group within Microsoft wanted to create a with a progress bar, but they couldn't figure out how to get rid of the Cancel button. "Is there a way to remove all the buttons from a Task Dialog?" Um, users hate it when you give them a window that cannot be closed or cancelled. What should the user do if the reticulatio...
