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Suggestion Box 4
The topic backlog from Suggestion Box 3 has nearly cleared out, and I've actually been enjoying not having to write up a reply every Monday for the past several months, but all good things must come...
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No, you can't lock a gadget to the top of the sidebar
In another installment of I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature, I offer you this customer: My customer has created a Windows Vista sidebar gadget and wants to know if there's a way...
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Things I've written that have amused other people, Episode 7
A customer asked for advice on how to accomplish something, the details of which are not important, except to say that what they were trying to do was far more complicated than the twenty-word summary...
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I will be speaking at TechReady11
Microsoft has an internal conference known as TechReady, the eleventh edition of which will take place in Seattle next week. Having learned that the way to get me to show up at your conference is to...
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If I'm not supposed to call IsBadXxxPtr, how can I check if a pointer is bad?
Some time ago, I opined that IsÂBadÂXxxÂPtr should really be called CrashÂProgramÂRandomly and you really should just let the program crash if somebody passes you a bad pointer. It is common to put...
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MSDN content is also available as a Web service
Unless you've been living under a rock, by now you know about MSDN's low bandwidth view (aka ScriptFree) and lightweight view. But there are other views too, like PDA view (for when you want to look...
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Why didn't Windows XP auto-elevate programs beyond those named setup.exe?
Commenter J-F has a friend who wonders why Windows XP didn't auto-elevate all installers but rather only the ones named setup.exe. (Perhaps that friend's name is Josh, who repeated the question twelve...
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Hardware backward compatibility: The finicky floppy drive
I think the behavior is more petulant than finicky, but finicky is alliterative. Back in the days of Windows 95, I was talking with the person responsible for, among other things, the floppy disk...
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The frustration of people who have already decided on the solution and won't...
I illustrate this frustration with an actual mail thread (suitably redacted) which I was an observer to. It's a long thread because that's part of the frustration. From: Adam I am looking for some...
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Why is my icon being drawn at the wrong size when I call DrawIcon?
Some time ago I had a problem with icon drawing. When I tried to draw an icon with DrawÂIcon it ended up being drawn at the wrong size. A call to GetÂIconÂInfo confirmed that the icon was 48×48, but...
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Holy cow, those TechReady attendees really love their tchotchkes
I was at the Ask the Experts event last night at TechReady11, and if I didn't know better, I would have thought the purpose of Ask the Experts was for attendees to wander the room collecting the...
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Decoding the parameters of a thrown C++ exception (0xE06D7363)
Special preview content for my TechReady talk later today. I'd like to claim it was planned this way, but actually it was just a coincidence. The Visual C++ compiler uses exception code 0xE06D7363 for...
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Did I know where the Novell short file name behavior came from?
Commenter Yuhong Bao asks, "Do you know that the Novell behavior described in "Not all short filenames contain a tilde" came from HPFS?" Yes, but it was not relevant to the discussion so I didn't...
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A brief conversation while preparing to hike along the Pacific coast
Many years ago, one of my colleagues (who happens to be an avid outdoorsy person with a dry sense of humor) assembled a small group of people to take a long weekend hike along the Capa Alava Trail and...
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Don't forget to replace your placeholder bitmaps with real bitmaps
The story We Burned the Poop reminded me of an embarrassing story a colleague of mine related from earlier in his programming career. During the development of the product he was working on, the...
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How many failure reports does a bug have to get before Windows will fix it?
When a program crashes or hangs, you are given the opportunity to send an error report to Microsoft. This information is collected by the Windows Error Reporting team for analysis. Occasionally,...
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Raymond misreads flyers, episode 2: It Takes You
As part of a new phase in Microsoft's continuing recycling efforts, the recycling program got a new motto. The new motto was not announced with any fanfare. Rather, any recycling-related announcement...
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Some known folders cannot be moved, but others can, and you'll just have to...
Locations in the shell known folder system can be marked as KF_CATEGORY_FIXED, which makes them immovable. Conversely, if a file system folder is not immovable, then it can be moved. This dichotomy...
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Everybody thinks about garbage collection the wrong way
Welcome to CLR Week 2010. This year, CLR Week is going to be more philosophical than usual. When you ask somebody what garbage collection is, the answer you get is probably going to be something along...
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When does an object become available for garbage collection?
As we saw last time, garbage collection is a method for simulating an infinite amount of memory in a finite amount of memory. This simulation is performed by reclaiming memory once the environment can...
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