Showing tag results for History

Ane asks why, if you have a string with an illegal filename character on the clipboard, and you paste that string into a rename edit box, do the illegal characters get deleted not just from the edit box but also the clipboard? Basically, it's a bug, the result of a poor choice of default in an internal helper class. There is an internal helper c...

Commenter S asks, "What happened to the return code from WinMain in a Windows 3.1 app?" After all, there was no function in 16-bit Windows. Basically, the exit code vanished into the ether. Unless you captured it. The Toolhelp library provided a low-level hook into various parts of the kernel, allowing you to monitor, among other things, the cr...

KJK::Hyperion asks, "Could you shed some light on Get/SetMessageExtraInfo? It's almost like nobody on earth used them, ever, and I can't get some sample code." Yup, that's about right. Nobody on earth (to within experimental error) ever used them. These functions were introduced on July 20, 1990 (I'm looking at the change history right now) at th...

(Windows was released on November 20, 1985, twenty-five years ago tomorrow. Happy birthday!) You have and you have . Why do we need both? They're both read-only directories. They are both searched by . They seem to be redundant. (There are other directories like which are not relevant to the discussion.) Back in the old days, the distinction wa...

If you search MSDN for , you'll find a few really old Knowledge Base articles that include it in a list of "class names of common Windows applications." I'm not sure why the Knowledge Base articles bothered to list those classes; there is no technical reason for applications to need to know this, and including the information merely encourages prog...

Wonder powers ActiMate!

What, they were digits?

Commenter Dean Earley asks, "Why is there a 'current directory' AND an current drive? Why not merge them?" Pithy answer: Originally, each drive had its own current directory, but now they don't, but it looks like they do. Okay, let's unwrap that sentence. You actually know enough to answer the question yourself; you just have to put the pieces...

DOOM and World of Warcraft.

In 2009, while hosting the Webcast launch of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (what a mouthful; no wonder they renamed it Lync), Stephen Elop claimed that this was the first time Microsoft had launched a major product via Webcast. Elop's crack team of marketing researchers apparently forgot about the Webcast launch, just three months earlie...