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How do I parse a string into a FILETIME?
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. The NLS functions...
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How do I get the tabbed dialog effect on my own custom tabbed dialog?
CJ observed that the standard tabbed dialogs provide an effect on the tab pages and want to know how to get the tabbed dialog effect on custom dialogs. fds242 noted this as well and wanted to know why...
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If you're asking somebody to help you, you want to make it easy for them, not...
A customer liaison asked a question that went roughly like this: From: Liaison My customer is having a problem with the header file winfoo.h. The environment is Windows Vista German SP1 with Visual...
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Instead of trying to create a filter that includes everything, try just...
The question was sent to a peer-to-peer discussion group for an internal program, let's call it Program Q. I'll add additional context so you can follow along. Hi, I'm trying to build a query that...
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What does the COINIT_SPEED_OVER_MEMORY flag to CoInitializeEx do?
One of the flags you can pass to CoÂInitializeÂEx is COINIT_SPEED_OVER_MEMORY, which is documented asCOINIT_SPEED_OVER_MEMORY: Trade memory for speed. This documentation is already vague since it...
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Thread affinity of user interface objects: Addendum
Some time ago, I discussed the thread affinity of device contexts, noting that the GetÂDC and ReleaseÂDC functions must be called from the same thread. The same restriction also applies to printer DCs....
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Why are taskbar live previews lost when you use Fast User Switching?
Anonymous asks a metric buttload of questions, which means that I feel compelled to answer all or none. And given the choice, I decided to answer none. Okay, I will answer one and ignore the rest. Why...
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Frequentists vs Bayesians
But, I mean, c'mon. Frequentists vs Bayesians? Worst. Action. Movie. Ever.
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Microsoft Money crashes during import of account transactions or when...
For the five remaining Microsoft Money holdouts (meekly raises hand), here's a patch for a crashing bug during import of account transactions or when changing a payee of a downloaded transaction in...
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Break it up, you two!: The zero width non-joiner
Keytips are those little pop-up keyboard accelerator thingies that appear on the Ribbon when you tap the Alt key: A tester discovered that when a test tried to read the accessibility name for a Ribbon...
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If you're going to write your own allocator, you need to respect the...
This time, I'm not going to set up a story. I'm just going to go straight to the punch line. A customer overrode the new operator in order to add additional instrumentation. Something like this:...
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How do I forward an exported function to an ordinal in another DLL?
The syntax for specifying that requests to import a function from your DLL should be forwarded to another DLL is ; A.DEF EXPORTS Dial = B.Call This says that if somebody tries to call Dial() from...
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Raymond's podcast list (for 2011, at least)
Ry Jones wants to know what other podcasts I subscribe to. Remember, I wrote this back in 2011. Here's what I listen to. Note that I am not averse to fast-forwarding over parts that don't interest me,...
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Microspeak: touch base
The verb phrase touch base is in general business jargon use, but it's quite popular at Microsoft. To touch base with someone is to contact someone in a lightweight and mostly-informal sort of way. In...
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How do I use group policy to improve security of USB thumb drives in my...
A customer wanted to know how they could improve the security of USB thumb drives in their organization. Specifically, they wanted to block access to removable media devices (primarily USB thumb...
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It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway:...
A security vulnerability report arrived which went roughly like this: When you programmatically enable the XYZ feature, the user receives no visual alert that it is enabled. As a result, malware can...
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The resource compiler will helpfully add window styles for you, but if you're...
A customer was having trouble with nested dialogs. They were doing something very similar to a property sheet, with a main frame dialog, and then a collection of child dialogs that take turns...
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When studying performance, you need to watch out not only for performance...
In addition to specific performance tests run by individual feature teams, Windows has a suite of automated performance tests operated by the performance team, and the results are collated across a...
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The Hater's Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog
Today is the traditional start of the holiday shopping season in the United States. If you are thinking of getting something from Williams-Sonoma, Drew Margary has selected a few items of note for...
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How does the window manager decide where to place a newly-created window?
Amit wonders how Windows chooses where to place a newly-opened window on a multiple-monitor system and gives as an example an application whose monitor choice appears inconsistent. The easy part is if...
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