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Ready... cancel... wait for it! (part 3)
A customer reported that their application was crashing in RPC, and they submitted a sample program which illustrated the same crash as their program. Their sample program was actually based on the...
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The 2010 Niney Award nominees have been announced
The nominees for the first (annual?) Niney Awards have been announced. The Nineys are an award which recognizes those who have had the greatest impact on the technical/developer community over the...
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The cursor isn't associated with a window or a window class; it's associated...
In my earlier discussion of the fact that changing a class property affects all windows of that class, commenters LittleHelper and Norman Diamond wanted to know "Why is the cursor associated with...
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Microspeak: Recycling bits or recycling electrons
To recycle bits (or recycle electrons) is to take an old piece of email and use it to answer a similar (often identical) question or discussion on a mailing list. This is usually done by simply...
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Why does SHGetKnownFolderPath return E_FAIL for a known folder?
A customer reported having problems with the SHGetKnownFolderPath function. I've left in the red herrings. On Windows 7, I'm trying to retrieve the Internet folder with the following code: if...
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Psychic debugging: Because of course when something doesn't work, it's...
When something stops working, you begin developing theories for why it doesn't work, and normally, you start with simple theories that involve things close to you, and only after you exhaust those...
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How do specify that a shortcut should not be promoted as newly-installed on...
Windows XP employed a number of heuristics to determine which Start menu shortcuts should be promoted when an application is newly-installed. But what if those heuristics end up guessing wrong? You...
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Any intelligent human being
The story of The Best reminded me of a classmate from school who was inordinately fond of the phrase any intelligent human being. For example, our classmate would say, "Any intelligent human being...
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What happens when you email the people in the I'm a PC commercial?
In 2008, the first I'm a PC ad aired, opening with Sean Siler doing an impression of John Hodgman portraying a PC, and continuing with montage of people proudly announcing, "I'm a PC!" Accompanying...
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Window message parameters do not come with metaphysical certitude
The MSDN documentation for window messages describes what each of the parameters means, but just because it means something doesn't mean that it is that something; it merely means it. But you knew...
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Don't mention the war. I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it...
In preparation for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, the official UK tourism bureau produced tips for dealing with people from other countries.
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What is the difference between a directory and a folder?
Windows 95 introduced Windows Explorer and along with it the term folder. What is the relationship between folders and directories? Some people believe that Windows 95 renamed directories to folders,...
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What is the highest numerical resource ID permitted by Win32?
A customer asked the following question: What is the maximum legal value of a resource identifier? Functions like LoadString take a UINT as the resource ID, which suggests a full 32-bit range, but in...
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WM_NCHITTEST is for hit-testing, and hit-testing can happen for reasons other...
The WM_NCHITTEST message is sent to your window in order determine what part of the window corresponds to a particular point. The most often reason for this is that the mouse is over your window....
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If an operation results in messages being sent, then naturally the target...
If an operation includes as part of its processing sending messages, then naturally the target window for those messages must be processing messages (or more precisely, the thread which owns the...
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Sharktopus: Just when you thought it was safe to see what movies are coming out
Sharktopus: Half-shark. Half-octopus. All-killer. I am not making that up. The Web site is sharktopusmovie.com, presumably because sharktopus.com was already taken. I am not making that up. I guess...
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Dr. Watson and the bluescreen - a story from the trenches
A fellow Microsoft employee volunteered a story from his prior work at a hospital as their enterprise architect. I received an escalation from our Tier 1 service desk on a Dr. Watson. Why would I get...
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How long does an idle UNC connection remain active before it is automatically...
When you access a resource via a UNC, the Windows network redirector keeps the virtual circuit open for a while even after you close the resource. This is done to take advantage of locality: If you...
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Shortcuts are serializable objects, which means that they can be stored in...
It's true that the vast majority of the time, people consider the shell shortcut object as synonymous with the .lnk file it is normally saved into, shortcuts need not spend their time in a file. You...
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iPhone pricing as economic experiment
Back in 2005, Slate's Tim Harford wondered why Microsoft didn't raise the introductory price of Xbox 360 game consoles. With the price set at $300, lines were long and shortages were many. Harford's...
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