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We're all in the same position. Since we work with computers all day, everybody in the extended family considers us the technical support department. One thing you all need to take away from your role as family technical support department is that normal people view computers completely differently from the way you and I do. One of my relatives ca...

As a follow-up to the difference between My Documents and Application Data, I'd like to rant about all the subdirectories of My Documents that programs create because they think they're so cool. I'm sure there are more. Everything in the My Documents folder the user should be able to point to and say, "I remember creating that file on such-and...

Some years ago, a group different from the one I worked in invited me to "volunteer" to help them with serious problems they were having with their product. They asked to "borrow" me for one week so that I could magically resolve all their issues. I wasn't really that familiar with their product, and I certainly didn't know how it worked internall...

We interrupt this religious holiday for an important commercial announcement. As a special Christmas present, my new best friends at Addison-Wesley sent me an advance copy of the dead-tree edition of my book. (Obligatory plug: Order it from Amazon. You know I want you to.) One commenter asked whether my book would be available electronically. O...

"I bet somebody is looking to get a really nice bonus for that feature." A customer was having trouble with one of their features that scans for resources that their program can use, and, well, the details aren't important. What's important is that their feature ran in the Startup group, and as soon as it found a suitable resource, it displayed a ...

Internally, a critical section is a bunch of counters and flags, and possibly an event. (Note that the internal structure of a critical section is subject to change at any time—in fact, it changed between Windows XP and Windows 2003. The information provided here is therefore intended for troubleshooting and debugging purposes and ...

The Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows

Here's a question that floated past my view: How do I set the ACLs on a file so users can read it but can't copy it? I can't find a "Copy" access mask that I can deny. If I can't deny copying, I'd at least like to audit it, so I can tell who made a copy of the file. There is no "Copy" access mask because copying is not a fundamental file operati...

Last time, I introduced a friend I called "Bob" for the purposes of this story. At a party earlier this year, I learned second-hand what Bob had been up to more recently. The team Bob worked for immediately prior to his retirement gave him a call. "Hi, Bob. We're trying to ship version N+1 of Product X, and we really need your help. I k...

One of my friends (let's call him "Bob") retired from Microsoft many years ago. Bob is an amazing programmer whose skills I remain in awe of. I remember visiting his office one evening with a mutual friend ("Fred") to catch up on things. When we turned up, he showed us a problem that he was working on. He was doing some sort of fancy graphics effe...