Showing tag results for Code

Probably the biggest category of problems that can be traced to violating COM single-threaded apartment rules in the shell is using an object from the wrong thread. Of course, nobody admits to doing this up front, They just report that the shell is broken. We can't enumerate the items on the desktop any more. We take the pointer returned by and...

At the end of the day, there's a window handle in there. As we saw a few years ago, windows have thread affinity. You can push work to a background thread all you want, but once you send a message to the window (or do something that results in a message being sent to the window), you've given control to the UI thread. Since the shell is all abou...

Back in the late 1990's, the window manager team received a bug that said that sometimes the mouse button state got messed up and the computer acted as if the buttons were stuck down. Further investigation revealed that it occurred only when one particular program was running, and only if the user had enabled mouse button swapping. The reason is...

Commenter dingo asks, "Why are shortcuts so hard to manipulate? Why can't they be as easy as unix links?" Well, if you want something like unix links, then you can just create a hard link. Creating them is about the same difficulty ( vs ) and manipulating them is the same since you don't actually manipulate a hard link. You just use it like a regu...

Commenter Phil Quirk wants to know what the rules are for determining which windows appear in the Alt+Tab list. It's actually pretty simple although hardly anything you'd be able to guess on your own. Note: The details of this algorithm are an implementation detail. It can change at any time, so don't rely on it. In fact, it already changed with ...

One "optimization" I've seen from some programs is to defer a bunch of system configuration work to the first time the program is run or the first time a feature is requested instead of doing it at install time. The problem with this is that the first person to run your program is not guaranteed to be an administrator. For example, there is one po...

One of the lesser-known button styles is . Makes a button (such as a check box, three-state check box, or radio button) look and act like a push button. The button looks raised when it isn't pushed or checked, and sunken when it is pushed or checked. In other words, you add this style to a check box or radio button to make it look like a push ...

Surprisingly, it is not a security vulnerability that administrators can add other users to the Administrators group. But that doesn't stop people from claiming that it is. For example, it's not uncommon for a vulnerability report to come in with the following steps: Wow, this looks bad. An unprivileged user can elevate to administrator and... ...

Many functions accept a source string that consists of both a pointer and a length. And if you pass a length that is greater than the length of the string, the result depends on the function itself. Some of those functions, when given a string and a length, will stop either when the length is exhausted or a null terminator is reached whichever c...

Here's a customer question: I've put data on the clipboard as delay-rendered, but I'm getting a request for my for many operations even though nobody actually looks at the files. Operations such as right-clicking a blank space on the desktop or opening the Edit menu. I don't want to render the data until the user hits Paste because generating th...