Showing tag results for Other

Increasingly, I'm seeing solving problems by adding more dialog boxes. Asking the user too much is as bad as not asking enough. "You clicked on the Notepad icon. Do you wish to run Notepad?" Okay, nobody would write a dialog box that stupid, would they? But the following dialog boxes don't really help much either: "You clicked on an mp3 file. ...

I have gazed into my crystal ball and emerged with a prediction for 2006. Revealing my prediction now may influence the event itself, so I will post only the hash for the prediction. I will post the actual prediction at the end of the year. The output of this program (after you replace "prediction goes here" with the actual prediction, of cour...

It's a lost smiley face.

The format of the command line returned by is "", but this is only a convention. If you pass for the to the function, then the function will treat the first word of the as the program name. However, if you pass a value for , then that string determines the program that is run, and the string passed as the is not used for that purpose. This ...

I recall a bug that we were investigating that was being caused by a registry key being set when it shouldn't have been. But when you looked at the key in Regedit, it say "(value not set)". Why were we going down the "value is set" branch? A little spelunking with the debugger revealed the reason directly: Whoever set up that registry key wrote the...

"OOF" is a word you hear a lot at Microsoft. KC Lemson gave the etymology a while back (though my recollection is that it stood for "Out of Office Feature", not that my memory is good for much nowadays). Incidentally, KC is profiled on the Microsoft Careers site, though she goes under the top-secret code name "KC" there. Most people set their "...

If changing a setting requires administrator privileges in the first place, then any behavior that results cannot be considered a security hole because in order to alter the setting, attackers must already have gained administrative privileges on the machine, at which point you've already lost the game. If attackers have administrative privileges,...

Last time, we left off with a promise to discuss ways your program can be Internet-facing without your even realizing it, and probably the most common place for this is the command line. Thanks to CIFS, files can be shared across the Internet and accessed via UNC notation. This means that anybody can set up a CIFS server and create files like , an...

Not every code injection bug is a security hole.

Yes, there are plenty of scripting languages that are much better than boring old batch. Batch files were definitely a huge improvement over back in 1981, but they've been showing their age for quite some time. The advanced age of boring old batch, on the other hand, means that you have millions of batch files out there that you had better not br...