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Because every app that gets blocked is another reason for people not to upgrade to the next version of Windows. Look at all these programs that would have stopped working when you upgraded from Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.1. Actually, this list is only partial. Many times, the compatibility fix is made inside the core component for all programs rath...

Three examples off the top of my head of the consequences of grovelling into and relying on undocumented structures. Defragmenting things that can't be defragmented In Windows 2000, there are several categories of things that cannot be defragmented. Directories, exclusively-opened files, the MFT, the pagefile... That didn't stop a certain software...

I think it was Internet Explorer 5.0, when we discovered that a thirdparty browser extension had a serious bug, the details of which aren't important. The point was that this bug was so vicious, it crashed IE pretty frequently. Not good. To protect the users from this horrible fate, we marked the object as "bad" so IE wouldn't load it. And then we...

In a comment, somebody asked what the deal was with the unsafe device removal dialog in Windows 2000 and why it's gone in Windows XP. I wasn't involved with that dialog, but here's what I remember: The device was indeed removed unsafely. If it was a USB storage device, for example, there may have been unflushed I/O buffers. If it were a printer, t...

You may have noticed that Windows as a general rule checks structure sizes strictly. For example, consider the MENUITEMINFO structure: Notice that the size of this structure changes depending on whether WINVER >= 0x0500 (i.e., whether you are targetting Windows 2000 or higher). If you take the Windows 2000 version of this structure and pass ...

Robert Scoble posted an entry in his Longhorn blog on the subject of what the UI defaults should be. It sure has stirred up a lot of controvery. I may pick at the remarks over the upcoming days, but for now I posted responses to two of the comments he kicked up. We recently did a survey of users of al...

If you look at the implementation of FlushInstructionCache on Windows 95, you'll see that it's just a return instruction. It doesn't actually do anything. So why do you have to call it? Because the act of calling it is the whole point. The control transfers implicit in calling a function suffice to flush the instruction cache on a Pentium. The fu...

To deny a device removal query, you must return the special value BROADCAST_QUERY_DENY, which has the curious value 0x424D5144. What's the story behind that? Well, we first tried following the pattern set by WM_QUERYENDSESSION, where returning TRUE allows the operation to proceed and returning FALSE causes the operation to fail. But when we did t...

Finally I can tell you.

GetWindowLongPtr(hwnd, GWLP_WNDPROC) [or GetWindowLong(hwnd, GWL_WNDPROC) if you haven't yet made your code 64-bit compatible] is supposed to return the current window procedure. Why do I sometimes get wacko values? Because sometimes "you can't handle the truth". If the current window procedure is incompatible with the caller of GetWindowLongPtr,...