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The PSN_SETACTIVE notification is sent each time your wizard page is activated
A customer had received a number of crashes via Windows Error Reporting and believed that they had found a bug in the tree view common control. In our UI, we have a tree view with checkboxes. The tree...
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The video of Microsoft Store employees dressed in Windows colors, revealed by...
One of my former colleagues tipped me off to this video of the Grand Opening of the newest Microsoft Store, specifically calling out this moment at timecode 0:48 of a curtain dropping, revealing...
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If the shell is written in C++, why not just export its base classes?
ton suggested that since the shell is written in C++, IShellFolder should have been an abstract class, and then it could have used techniques like exceptions and Inversion of Control. Okay, first of...
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Squeezing the last bit of enjoyment out of the lost half-inning of a baseball...
A colleague of mine complained, "When the home team is winning, they don't bother playing the bottom half of the ninth inning. I'm getting ripped off! Make them finish the game!" This led to some...
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No good deed goes unpunished: Helping to redirect a question
It is a common occurrence that a question is sent to a mailing that is close, but not quite right. Usually somebody will provide information to help redirect the question to a more appropriate mailing...
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Raymond misreads restaurant names: Local 360
Okay, maybe this time I'm misreading it on purpose, but when I see the name of popular new restaurant Local 360, I think, "That doesn't look all that low-calorie to me. I bet their dishes have more...
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How can I get notified when some other window is destroyed?
A customer wanted to know whether there was a method (other than polling) to monitor another window and find out when it gets destroyed. The goal was to automate some operation, and one of the steps...
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Why do the pinned items in the Jump List go on the top instead of the bottom?
When you pin items to the Jump List, they go to the top of the menu that appears when you right-click the Taskbar item. Why not put the pinned items at the bottom? After all, over 98% of users leave...
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Why isn't my transparent static control transparent?
A customer reported that their application uses transparent static controls positioned over a bitmap image control, but even though they set the Transparent property on the static control, the static...
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My least effective Hallowe'en costume
One year I decided to dress as a nerd for Hallowe'en. I took an old pair of glasses with large lenses, "repaired" it with some masking tape, and combined it with a plaid dress shirt with a pocket...
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The power of statistical photography
Inside Microsoft, there was an employee photography contest to provide images to be included in Windows 7, either in one of the pre-release versions or in the final product. Each subsidiary selected...
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Debugging why a user's taskbar disappeared
A customer reported that they had gone to the Screen Saver control panel, selected a screen saver that they had recently downloaded, then hit the Test button to see what it looked like. He was pleased...
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We've traced the call and it's coming from inside the house: A function call...
A customer reported that they had a problem with a particular function added in Windows 7. The tricky bit was that the function was used only on very high-end hardware, not the sort of thing your...
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How do I generate a unique 32-bit value for a time zone?
Public Service Announcement: Daylight Saving Time ends in most parts of the United States this weekend. Other parts of the world may change on a different day from the United States. A customer asked...
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The life story of the SwitchToThisWindow function
Commenters Mick and Nick (you guys ever considered teaming up and forming a morning radio show?) are interested in the life story of the SwitchToThisWindow function. The SwitchToThisWindow was...
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Percentages may not add up to 100%, but not for the reason you suggest
I saw a chart which had the disclaimer, "Percentages may not add up to 100%, as they are rounded to the nearest percent." The values in the table were 10.4%, 4.0%, 9.4%, 9.3%, 9.2%, 21.2%, 20.0%, and...
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Microspeak: Level-set
In mathematics, a level set is the set of points at which a function takes a particular value. This has nothing to do with the way the term is used at Microsoft. In fact, the way the term is used at...
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Okay, everybody, it's time for rumors and gossip
A friend of mine told me one technique his boss used for keeping group meetings on time. The last item on every meeting agenda was called Rumors and gossip. A group meeting is sort of like a mandatory...
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How can I tell whether a DLL has been registered?
A customer pointed out that you can use regsvr32 to register a DLL or to unregister it, but how do you query whether a DLL has been registered? DLL registration (via regsvr32) is not declarative; it...
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Stupid Raymond talent: Screaming carrier
Similar to Mike, I was able to scream (not whistle: scream) a 300 baud carrier tone. This skill proved useful when I was in college and the mainframe system was down. Instead of sitting around waiting...
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