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Suppose you have a string of the form . How can you parse this into something your program can manipulate, like say a or a ? Basically, you can't in the general case. The time zone abbreviation CST is ambiguous. It could mean U.S./Canada Central Standard Time, Australian Central Standard Time, China Standard Time, or Cuba Summer Time. There ma...

On Windows NT-based operating systems, process and thread IDs happen always to be a multiple of four. Is this just a coincidence? Yes, it's just a coincidence, and you shouldn't rely on it since it is not part of the programming contract. For example, Windows 95 process and thread IDs were not always multiples of four. (By comparison, th...

Making the last change.

Commenter Adam Russell asks why Ctrl+ScrollLock cancels dialogs. Easy. Because Ctrl+ScrollLock is the same as Ctrl+Break, and Ctrl+Break cancels dialogs. Okay, that answer actually raises two more questions. First, why is Ctrl+ScrollLock the same as Ctrl+Break? This is a consequence of the backward compatibility designed into the Enhanced Keyboa...

Recall that the identified a set of variables. This causes a bit of a problem if your program has multiple data segments; in other words, multiple sets of variables. In such a program, the code would load the data segment of whatever variable it needed each time it needed to access a variable from a different segment. This was no problem at all f...

doesn't do anything. What's the point of a macro that doesn't do anything? It did something back in 16-bit Windows. Recall that in 16-bit Windows, the was the mechanism for identifying a data segment; i.e., a bunch of memory that represents the set of variables in use by a module. If you had two copies of Notepad running, there was one co...

Stepping forward while looking back.

The movie This Is Spinal Tap introduced the world to the phrase going to eleven. The people over at Windows Media Player were not immune to its charms, alluding to the catchphrase in their advertising campaign. Back in Windows 95, I know that there was at least one person who lobbied the multimedia team to give the Volume Control program e...

In addition to all the named values you can create underneath a registry key with the function, there is also the so-called default value which you obtain by passing or a pointer to a null string as the . This default value is also the value set and retrieved when you call and . What's the deal with this default value? The original 16-bit regis...

Back in 16-bit Windows, the registry was a very different beast. Originally, the only registry hive was , and the only things it was used for were COM object registration and file type registration. (Prior to the registry, file type registration was done in , and the only verb you could register for was "open".) The registry was stored in a singl...