Showing results for Code - The Old New Thing

Our old friend, the IContextMenu.

Last time, we wrote a simple program to print various properties of the items in the Recycle Bin, and we did so in the classical style, using item ID lists and s. One thing you may have noticed is that a lot of functions take the combination of an and a . In the shell namespace, operations on items usually happen by means of the pair (folder, ch...

For some reason, a lot of people are interested in programmatic access to the contents of the Recycle Bin. They never explain why they care, so it's possible that they are looking at their problem the wrong way. For example, one reason for asking, "How do I purge an item from the Recycle Bin given a path?" is that some operation in their program...

The header file defines a GUID called , but a customer was having trouble using it. The strange compiler error the customer referred to is the following: "I don't see what the compiler is complaining about. The parentheses appear to be properly matched before the left brace." Remember, what you see is not necessarily what the compiler see...

On unix, you can use to count the number of lines in stdin. Windows doesn't come with , but there's a sneaky way to count the number of lines anyway: It is a special quirk of the command that the null string is treated as never matching. The flag reverses the sense of the test, so now it matches everything. And the flag returns the count. ...

The function stipulates that all list items must be aligned on a boundary. For 32-bit Windows, is 8, but the structure itself does not have a attribute. Even more confusingly, the documentation for says that the 64-bit structure needs to be 16-byte aligned but says nothing about the 32-bit structure. So what are the memory alignment re...

Not all changes within a directory result in the directory changing.

One of the rules for is so obvious that nobody even bothers to state it explicitly as a rule: "If somebody asks you for an interface, and you return , then the pointer you return must point to the interface the caller requested." (This feels like the software version of dumb warning labels.) During compatibility testing for Windows Vista,...

In an old discussion of why the function modifies its command line, commenter Random832 asked, "What if there is no space between the program name and arguments - like "cmd/?" - where does it put the null then?" The function requires a space between the program name and arguments. If you leave out the space, then the arguments are considered ...

A question arrived from a customer (with the rather unhelpful subject line Question for Microsoft) wondering why, when they call and then ask for the states of the various menu items like , the menu item states don't reflect reality. The menu item states don't synchronize with reality until the user actually opens the system menu. There is no req...