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...
When I wrote about understanding the consequences of , I mentioned that one of the possible responses was to try to repair the damage, but some people are suspicious of this approach.
Mind you, I'm suspicious of it, too. Repairing corruption is hard. You have to anticipate the possibility, create enough of a trail to be able to reconstruct the ...
If you are placed in the unfortunate position of having to debug
a user-mode crash from kernel mode,
one of the first things you have to do is get back to the exception
on the user-mode side so you can see what happened.
We saw earlier
how you can get symbols for operating system binaries to help you
suck the exception pointers out of a user-mode...
It was possible to use generic thunks in 16-bit code to allow it to call into 32-bit code. Why can't we do the same thing to allow 32-bit code to call 64-bit code?
It's the address space.
Both 16-bit and 32-bit Windows lived in a 32-bit linear address space. The terms 16 and 32 refer to the size of the offset relative to the selector.
Oka...
I was looking at one of those "my program is consuming 100% of the CPU and I don't know why" bugs, and upon closer investigation, the proximate reason the program was consuming 100% CPU was that one of the threads was being bombarded with messages where the is . The program was dispatching them as fast as it could, but the messages just kept on c...