Showing results for Code - The Old New Thing

For some time (I am too lazy to look up when it was introduced), the Visual Studio linker has supported a feature known as delay-loading. But why can't you use this feature to delay-load a function from ? It would be very handy: If you write the program fails to load on versions of Windows which do not support the function because the Win32 ...

A customer asked, Is there a way to turn off Full Window Drag on a single window? I have a resizable control that I would like not update itself while resizing. It so happens that I wrote a sample program ages ago to illustrate how to do this. You can find it in the Platform SDK under . The source code is also reproduced in this Knowledge ...

There seemed to be a great deal of disbelief that anybody would hard-code the path to Notepad. Here's one example and here's another. There's a large class of problems that go like this: I'm running Program X, and when I tell it to view the error log, I get this error message: What is wrong and how do I fix it? Obviously, the file is ...

You may hear an old-timer developer use the verb zap. That proposed fix will work. Until everybody gets the fix, they can just zap the assert. The verb to zap means to replace a breakpoint instruction with an appropriate number of NOP instructions (effectively ignoring it). The name comes from the old Windows 2.x kernel debugger. (Actually, ...

Jonathan Wilson asks why the clipboard APIs still require GlobalAlloc and friends. Why is there not a or something that does what does but without needing to call ? Okay, here's your function: Whoop-dee-doo. Historically, Windows doesn't go out of its way to include functions like this because you can easily write them yourself, or you ...

It turns out that my quick overview of how processes exit on Windows XP was already out of date when I wrote it. Mind you, the information is still accurate for Windows XP (as far as I know), but the rules changed in Windows Vista. What about critical sections? There is no "Uh-oh" return value for critical sections; doesn't have a...

A colleague of mine showed me some code from a back-end program on a web server. Fortunately, the company that wrote this is out of business. Or at least I hope they're out of business!

Jeffrey Riaboy asks why, if he renames a function in his DEF file, attempts to link to the function by its old name fail. Well, um, yeah, because you renamed it. Let's take the situation apart a bit; maybe it'll make more sense. I'm going to ignore a lot of details (, calling conventions) since they are not relevant to the discussion and wou...

As you are I'm sure aware, you shouldn't be doing much of anything in your function, but you have to watch out for cases where you end up doing them accidentally. Some time ago, I was investigating a failure which was traced back to loading a DLL inside . Wait, what kind of insane person loads a DLL as part of shutting down? Shouldn't you be cl...

A customer had the following problem: We're calling to retrieve the command line, and the documentation says that it returns a single null-terminated string. However, when we call it in our application, we find that it is actually a double-null-terminated string. The buffer returned consists of a series of null-terminated strings, one string per ...