Showing tag results for Code

A customer asked for advice on accessibility. This was great news, because it meant that somebody actually cared about accessibility! We have a property sheet page that contains an unlabeled list view. The list view is not labeled because its meaning is implied by its placement on the dialog. This works great as long as you can see the screen, bu...

The MFC documentation for contains the following strange warning: When the user allocates their own buffer to accommodate , the buffer can't be larger than 2048 or else everything gets corrupted (2048 is the maximum size). The sudden informality of the phrase "or else everything gets corrupted" is surprising but also sounds vaguely familiar to...

The first problem with discussing file last-access time is agreeing what you mean by a file's last-access time. The file system folks have one definition of the file last-access time, namely the time the file was most recently opened and either read from or written to. This is the value retrieved by functions like , , and . The problem with th...

Some time ago I mentioned that during process termination, the gates are now electrified: If you attempt to enter a critical section that is owned by a thread that was terminated by an earlier phase of process termination, the entire process is forcibly terminated. Windows Vista introduced a new lightweight synchronization pseudo-object known as ...

We saw some time ago that the number one cause of crashes in Explorer is malware. It so happens that the number one cause of hangs in Explorer is disk access from context menu handlers (a special case of the more general principle, you can't open the file until the user tells you to open it). That's why I was amused by Memet's claim that "w...

A customer requested a clarification on the MSDN documentation for the function. The MSDN documentation says that if the parameter is , then the behavior is undefined. Is this true? As explicitly stated in MSDN, the behavior is undefined. Observe that the annotation on the parameter is , which means that the parameter must be a non- value...

Impersonation requires end-to-end support.

A customer was trying to track down a memory leak in their program. Their leak tracking tool produced the stacks which allocated memory that was never freed, and they all seemed to come from , which is a DLL that comes with Windows. The customer naturally contacted Microsoft to report what appeared to be a memory leak in Windows. I was one of th...

A customer was creating a large file and found that, even though the file was opened with and the call was being made with an structure, the I/O was nevertheless completing synchronously. Knowledge Base article 156932 covers some cases in which asynchronous I/O will be converted to synchronous I/O. And in this case, it was scenario number thre...

A customer found that a single-byte write was taking several seconds, even though the write was to a file on the local hard drive that was fully spun-up. Here's the pseudocode: The customer experimented with using asynchronous I/O, but it didn't help. The write still took a long time. Even using (and writing full sectors, naturally) didn't he...