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The secret lair of Administrative Assistants
I dreamed that a colleague and I were looking for a copy of a TN3270 emulator in order to investigate a bug. The search took us into an abandoned-looking Building 5. But upon entering, we discovered...
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Microspeak: booked
Remember, the term Microspeak is not tightly scoped to mean jargon used only at Microsoft. It's jargon used at Microsoft more often than in general usage. Today, it's a term that you really need to...
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What does GDI use biXPelsPerMeter and SetBitmapDimensionEx for?
What does GDI use BITMAPINFOHEADER.biXPelsPerMeter and SetBitmapDimensionEx for? Nothing. The BITMAPINFOHEADER.biXPelsPerMeter and BITMAPINFOHEADER.biYPelsPerMeter are completely...
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Hey look, now I'm Director of Strategic Planning, oh, and my name also...
It looks like the Visio blog populated a sample organizational chart with pictures of Microsoft employees, and I am now Oliver Lee, Director of Strategic Planning. My secret identity has been...
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Untangling the confusingly-named WM_UPDATEUISTATE and WM_CHANGEUISTATE messages
I always get confused by the WM_UPDATEUISTATE and WM_CHANGEUISTATE messages, and I have to go figure them out each time I need to mess with them. So this time, I'm going to write it down so I...
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Your electric fan is trying to kill you, and other cultural superstitions
In Korea, it is generally believed that leaving a fan on in an enclosed room can be fatal. Ken Jennings looks at cultural superstitions and wrote a Slate article focusing on the scourge of Korean fan...
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Who sends the initial WM_UPDATEUISTATE message?
Last time, we looked at the confusingly-named WM_UPDATEUISTATE and WM_CHANGEUISTATE messages. But how does the whole indicator thingie get off the ground? The default state for a window is to show...
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Copying a file to the clipboard so you can paste it into Explorer or an email...
Today's Little Program takes a fully-qualified file name from the command line and puts that file onto the clipboard. Once there, you can paste it into an Explorer window, or into an email message, or...
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The importance of remembering parity in a back-and-forth race on your flying...
I dreamed that one of my friends had made the U.S. cycling team. (Perhaps because everybody else got busted for doping.) Even more implausibly, I also made the team. To celebrate, he challenged me to...
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A question about proper disposal of unwanted items with an unhelpful answer
On an internal mailing list about home maintenance and ownership, somebody asked: I have a handful of items that I need to get rid of and probably should not toss into the regular garbage. Any...
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How do I get a window back on the screen when it moved far, far away? Windows...
Some time ago, I showed how to get a window back on the screen when it moved far, far away. That technique still works in Windows 7 and 8, but there's an easier shortcut that takes advantage of window...
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Even though mouse-move, paint, and timer messages are generated on demand,...
We all know that the generated-on-demand messages like WM_MOUSEMOVE, WM_PAINT, and WM_TIMER messages are not posted into the queue when the corresponding event occurs, but rather are generated by...
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What happens if I manually post an auto-generated message into my message queue?
As we well know, the window manager generates various messages on-demand rather than posting them into the queue at the time the event occurs. But what happens if you manually post one of these...
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How do I customize the console properties for a shortcut to a console...
You already know how to create a shortcut: #include <windows.h> #include <tchar.h> #include <shlobj.h> #include <atlbase.h> // class CCoInitialize incorporated here by...
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What are the scoping rules for variables in nested courtyards?
I dreamed that I had to fix a bug caused by variable redeclaration inside a nested courtyard. Had to move the horses out of the way first. And then it got weird. I won't go into the orchestra...
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Why don't hotkeys for items on my Start menu work when I am in a fullscreen...
You can set a hotkey on the shortcuts in your Start menu, and Explorer will launch that shortcut when you press the hotkey, but not if you are in a fullscreen application, like when you set Paint into...
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What's the point of SecureZeroMemory?
The SecureZeroMemory function zeroes out memory in a way that the compiler will not optimize out. But what's the point of doing that? Does it really make the application more secure? I mean, sure...
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The posted message queue vs the input queue vs the message queue
There are multiple ways of viewing the interaction between posted messages and input messages. MSDN prefers to view posted messages and input messages as part of one giant pool of messages in a...
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Posted messages are processed ahead of input messages, even if they were...
Regardless of which interpretation you use, it remains the case that posted messages are processed ahead of input msesages. Under the MSDN interpretation, posted messages and input messages all go...
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How do I make it more difficult for somebody to take a screenshot of my window?
Ultimately, you can't stop somebody from ignoring the words Confidential at the top of a document and whipping out a digital camera and taking a picture of the screen. But at least starting in Windows...
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