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When you call the MessageBox function, you pass flags specifying which of a fixed set of button patterns you want (for example, Yes/No and OK/Cancel) and which button you want to be the default (MB_DEFBUTTON1 through MB_DEFBUTTON4.) Wait a second. What's with this MB_DEFBUTTON4? None of the button patterns are four-button patterns. The highest n...

One customer wanted a way to determine the name of the computer manufacturer. For example, they wanted to make some function call and get back "IBM" or "Compaq" or "Dell". I don't know why they wanted this information, and for the moment, I don't care. And of course, when you're looking for information, you don't search MSDN; that's for crazy pe...

We've seen a few instances where people have used a global setting to solve a local problem. For example, people who use the function to prevent a window from redrawing, toggle a global setting to see what its value is, or who change the system time zone as part of an internal calculation. To this, I'll add as an example a program which figures...

Here's a question from a customer: I made some changes related to my shell extension [details omitted], but the changes don't show up in the Explorer window when I refresh it. Any suggestions on how to solve this problem? When we asked how they were refreshing the Explorer window, we were expecting something like pressing F5 or calling with ,...

How many of them are there?

Commenter Anonymous asked why navigating to a drive with no media displays a dialog instead of showing the error message in the view. This is an unfortunate consequence of Explorer's browser/view model. The shell browser binds to the and asks for the view by calling . The view window calls to figure out what to show in the view—and here ...

Commenter kokorozashi wonders why you should bother with when you have already. If you want to pump messages and wait for a kernel object, then you can change all calls to , , and to replacement functions that use . Isn't that enough? Why waste an entire thread just to wait for that object? If you're so clever that you can modify every call t...

I mentioned in passing a few years ago that version 6 of the common controls supports only Unicode. And then other people stepped in to say, "Well, XYZ uses ANSI and that works for me." So does it support ANSI or doesn't it? It does and doesn't. All of the controls in the common controls library are internally Unicode. But not all controls in...

It's great to think about all the things that can go wrong but you also have to think about the situations that could lead to those bad things. In particular, you have to recognize when you are trying to avoid a bug that is ultimately outside your component and which you can't fix anyway. For example, consider this multithreaded race condition: ...

Public Service Announcement: Daylight Saving Time ends in most parts of the United States this weekend. I pointed out some time ago that Win32 and .NET deal with daylight saving time differently. Specifically, Win32 always deals with the time zone you are currently in (even if it's not the time zone that corresponds to the timestamp you are mani...