Clik here to view.
The OVERLAPPED associated with asynchronous I/O is passed by address, and you...
When you issue asynchronous I/O, the completion function or the I/O completion port receives, among other things, a pointer to the OVERLAPPED structure that the I/O was originally issued against. And...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What happened to the return code from WinMain in 16-bit Windows?
Commenter S asks, "What happened to the return code from WinMain in a Windows 3.1 app?" After all, there was no GetExitCodeProcess function in 16-bit Windows. Basically, the exit code vanished into...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Developing the method for taking advantage of the fact that the OVERLAPPED...
You can take advantage of the fact that the OVERLAPPED associated with asynchronous I/O is passed by address, but there was some confusion about how this technique could "work" when kernel mode has no...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How do I simulate input without SendInput?
Michal Zygmunt wants to create a system where multiple applications can have focus, with different users generating input and directing them at their target applications. Attempting to simulate this...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The __fortran calling convention isn't the calling convention used by FORTRAN
Although the Microsoft C compiler supports a calling convention called __fortran, that's just what the calling convention is called; its relationship with the FORTRAN programming language is only...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What is the correct way of temporarily changing a thread's preferred UI...
A customer ran into a crashing bug in their shell extension. The shell extension wants to change the thread's preferred UI language temporarily, so that it can load its resources from a specific...
View ArticleClik here to view.
That mysterious \001
Some time ago, we learned the story of that mysterious J. There is another mystery character that sometimes shows up in place of a smiley face: the \001. The character starts out as the Unicode...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Some suggestions on improving the assembly instructions for your children's...
Some suggestions for those companies which produce children's play furniture: If a part is 99.9% symmetric, please call out the other 0.1%. Otherwise, the person doing the assembling will waste five...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why can't you use the space bar to select check box and radio button elements...
Nektar wants to know why you can't use the space bar to select check box and radio button elements from a menu. The short answer is "Because it's a menu, not a dialog box." The check mark and radio...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Windows 7 not only can make a wallpaper slide show from images on your...
Buried in the theme file documentation is a section called [Slideshow] which lets you control the source for images that are used when you put the desktop wallpaper in slideshow mode. And a bonus...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Psychic debugging: When I copy a file to the clipboard and then paste it, I...
A customer reported the following strange problem: I tried to copy some text files from my computer to another computer on the network. After the copy completes, I looked at the network directory and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
WindowFromPoint, ChildWindowFromPoint, RealChildWindowFromPoint, when will it...
Oh wait, there's also ChildWindowFromPointEx. There are many ways of identifying the window that appears beneath a point. The documentation for each one describes how they work, but I figured I'd do a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What makes RealGetWindowClass so much more real than GetClassName?
There's GetClassName and then there's RealGetWindowClass. What makes RealGetWindowClass more real? Recall from last time that the Real... functions were added to support Windows accessibility....
View ArticleClik here to view.
2010 year-end link clearance
Another round of the semi-annual link clearance. Sir Humphrey Appleby has a blog, developed in conjunction with Yes, Prime Minister, the play. Everybody on television reads the same newspaper....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Begin feeling
A few years ago, the gas station near Microsoft's main campus (the one which had been run by my colleague in a previous stage of his career) appeared to have suffered some problems with the LCD unit...
View ArticleClik here to view.
From inside the Redmond Reality Distortion Field: Why publish documents in PDF?
A few years ago, the Windows 7 team developed a document to introduce technology writers to the features of Windows 7. The document was released in PDF format, which created quite a stir among certain...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why does SHGetSpecialFolderPath take such a long time before returning a...
A customer reported that their program was failing to start up because the call to SHGetSpecialFolderPath(CSIDL_PERSONAL) was taking a long time and then eventually returning with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Processes, commit, RAM, threads, and how high can you go?
Back in 2008, Igor Levicki made a boatload of incorrect assumptions in an attempt to calculate the highest a process ID can go on Windows NT. Let's look at them one at a time. So if you can't create...
View ArticleClik here to view.
When does a process ID become available for reuse?
A customer wanted some information about process IDs: I'm writing some code that depends on process IDs and I'd like to understand better problem of process ID reuse. When can PIDs be reused? Does it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why does pasting a string containing an illegal filename character into a...
Ane asks why, if you have a string with an illegal filename character on the clipboard, and you paste that string into a rename edit box, do the illegal characters get deleted not just from the edit...
View Article