Showing tag results for Other

One category of application that people complained about is the application launcher which keys off a hotkey and doesn't get the foreground love. Well, except that windows with registered hotkeys do get the foreground love. After you call the function to register a hotkey, the window manager will send you a message when the user presses tha...

They look pretty but act differently.

A few years ago, there was a question on a mailing list for topic X, but the question was about unrelated topic Y. The question was nevertheless answered by the people on the topic X mailing list out of the kindness of their hearts (above and beyond the heart-sourced kindness that powers most mailing lists in the first place). I poin...

My colleague Keith Moore (who occasionally comments on this site) shared with me one of his recent triumphs of psychic debugging. First the question: The customer is getting an RST response from IIS and they would like to know why. Here is a fragment from a network capture that illustrates the problem. (Fragment deleted.) The full capture is ava...

(Cultural note: The phrase the mating call of the loser is a term of derision. I used it here to create a more provocative headline even though it's stronger than I really intended, but good writing is bold.) When given a choice between two architectures, some people say that you should give users a checkbox to select which one should be used....

This Web site is not for beginners. I try to write for advanced programmers, and if you're not an advanced programmer, then you'll just have to accept that there will be times you are baffled by what I write. Often I dial the geek back a notch, explaining some things which should be "obvious" to an advanced programmer, such as why storing a consta...

Although you can tag your registry data with any of a variety of types, such as or or . What do these mean, really? Well, that depends on what you mean by mean, specifically, who is doing the interpreting. At the bottom, the data stored in the registry are opaque chunks of data. The registry itself doesn't care if you lie and write two bytes...

Hives, keys, values, types, and data. As I noted some years ago, the file that holds the registry data is called a hive. A hive contains a tree of keys. Keys contain a list of values. Associated with each value is a type and data. The terminology is weird and counter-intuitive thanks to the history of the registry. Back in the days ...

Why not have a month where everybody focuses on improving documentation like that month a few years ago where everybody focused on security? Well, part of it is that most people suck at technical writing. The technical part, maybe, but the writing almost definitely not. Writing is hard (as I've learned firsthand), and technical writing is a spec...

Someone wondered why you can't apply ACLs to individual registry values, only to the containing keys. You already know enough to answer this question; you just have to put the pieces together. In order for a kernel object to be ACL-able, you need to be able to create a handle to it, since it is the act of creating the handle that performs the...