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Everybody thinks about CLR objects the wrong way (well not everybody)
Many people responded to Everybody thinks about garbage collection the wrong way by proposing variations on auto-disposal based on scope: "Any local variable that is IDisposable should dispose itself...
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How do I get the reference count of a CLR object?
A customer asked the rather enigmatic question (with no context): Is there a way to get the reference count of an object in .Net? Thanks, Bob Smith Senior Developer Contoso The CLR does not maintain...
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How can I find all objects of a particular type?
More than one customer has asked a question like this: I'm looking for a way to search for all instances of a particular type at runtime. My goal is to invoke a particular method on each of those...
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When do I need to use GC.KeepAlive?
Finalization is the crazy wildcard in garbage collection. It operates "behind the GC", running after the GC has declared an object dead. Think about it: Finalizers run on objects that have no active...
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What happened to WinHelp?
Commenter winhelp (probably not his/her real name) wonders what happened to WinHelp.exe. I don't know, but it turns out the answer was already known to the Internet. At the time the question was...
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What was that story about the WinHelp pen-writing-in-book animation?
The first time you open a WinHelp file, you get this pen-writing-in-book animation while WinHelp does um something which it passes off as preparing Help file for first use or something similarly...
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Microspeak: The funnel
In the Customer Service and Support part of Microsoft, you will often see the term funnel. Here are some citations: Effectively and efficiently solve issues by driving levers across the entire funnel....
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How do I get the Explorer navigation pane to highlight the current folder all...
In Windows 7, the folder tree in the Explorer navigation pane by default no longer highlights the item in the view pane. This change was based on user testing and feedback, but if, like me, you prefer...
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I challenge you to come up with an even lamer physics pun
The other day, I was in the office kitchenette, and two of my colleagues both named Paul happened to be there getting coffee. I quipped, "Oh no, is this legal? I think it's a violation of the Paul...
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Why does the primary monitor have (0,0) as its upper left coordinate?
By definition, the primary monitor is the monitor that has (0,0) as its upper left corner. Why can't the primary monitor be positioned somewhere else? Well, sure you could do that, but then you'd have...
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Miss France, she has the Eiffel Tower on her head, because France has the...
Miss Universe 2010 National Costumes, Part 1 Miss Universe 2010 National Costumes, Part 2 Commentary in parts NSFW but they so deserve it.
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Be careful that your splash screen doesn't squander the foreground love
Commenter Erbi has a program which creates a splash screen on a background thread while the main thread initializes. "I create and then destroy this splash screen window just before creating and...
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Windows 95: It sucks less
Today marks the 15th anniversary of the public release of Windows 95. During the development of Windows 95, one of the team members attended a Mac conference. And not as a secret agent, either. He...
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Why did the Explore option disappear from the context menu of folders in the...
A customer noticed that when you right-click on Computer in the second column of the Start menu on Windows Vista, the first two options are Open and Explore. On the other hand, in Windows 7, the...
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What young children do when they hear a foreign language
My young nieces live in a Chinese-speaking household, which is great for them because it means that when they grow up, they will be fluent in two languages. But it makes things a bit tricky at the...
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How do I recover the window handle passed to ShellExecute?
A customer had the following question: I'm using the ShellExecute function to launch a new process and am passing the handle to my application's main window as the hwnd parameter. From the new...
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If you return from the main thread, does the process exit?
If instead of calling ExitProcess you merely return from the main thread of a process, does the process terminate? No, but maybe yes. This is another one of the places where the C runtime behaves...
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On LockWindowUpdate: Locking the taskbar
Andy Visser posted to the Suggestion Box something that wasn't so much a suggestion as a comment, presumably to get around the fact that comments on the original item had been closed: "I've found that...
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Reflections create Xbox logo on neighbor's roof
In other parts of the world, religious images emerge from random patterns. Out here, we get Microsoft marketing. If I were on it, I could've charged admission.
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Shutdown reason codes are reason codes, not error codes or HRESULTs
A customer liaison asked the following question on behalf of his customer: My customer is finding that their Windows Server 2003 system has restarted, and they want to find out why. I've found some...
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