Showing tag results for Code

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...

A colleague of mine was having trouble getting the metacharacter in a regular expression to work. Of course, when somebody asks a question like that, you first have to establish what their definition of "work" is. Fortunately, he provided some examples: "The last two entries are just sanity checks to make sure I didn't make some stupid mistake l...

A customer reported a problem with their shell extension: We want to format a floating point number according to the user's default locale. We do this by calling to convert the value from floating point to text with a period (U+002E) as the decimal separator, then using to apply the user's preferred grouping character, decimal separator, etc. W...

We saw some time ago that you can't simulate keyboard input with . You may get away with it, depending on how the application you're trying to fake out processes input, but since you're just faking data, the application may discover that it's all a ruse when they try to access information that you didn't fake out, say by calling and discovering t...