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Function requirements are cumulative: If you fail to meet any of them, then...
A customer was having problems with the WaitForMultipleObjects function: We are looking for a clarification of the behavior of WaitForMultipleObjects. We have a thread that waits on two handles...
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How can I generate a consistent but unique value that can coexist with GUIDs?
A customer needed to generate a GUID for each instance of a hardware device they encounter: The serial number for each device is 20 bits long (four and a half bytes). We need to generate a GUID based...
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How do I monitor, or even control, the lifetime of an Explorer window?
A customer wanted help with monitoring the lifetime of an Explorer window. We want to launch a copy of Explorer to open a specific folder, then wait until the user closes the folder before continuing....
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Paul Cézanne and Camille Saint-Saëns may have similar-sounding last names,...
Next week, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra performs the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony, but the people responsible for the symphony's radio advertisements don't realize that. As the strains of the symphony...
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Why did Win32 define BOOL as a signed int instead of an unsigned int?
Igor Levicki wants somebody from Microsoft to explain why BOOL was defined as a signed int instead of an unsigned int. You don't need to work for Microsoft to figure this out. All the information you...
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Although the default icon for a shortcut is the icon of the target, you can...
A customer reported that a shortcut they deployed to their employees' desktops was triggering unwanted server traffic. My customer deploys a shortcut on %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Desktop, and this shortcut...
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How do I get the title of a dialog from a dialog resource?
A customer submitted the following question: We are developing automated tests for our application. Among other things, our application uses property sheets, which means that the name of the tab is...
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Having an owner window from another process is tricky, but it's sometimes the...
A customer had a main program (let's call it A) and a helper program (let's call it B), and the customer wanted and wanted B to act like a modal dialog relative to A. When B is launched, we disable...
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2011 Q1 link clearance: Microsoft blogger edition
It's that time again: Linking to other Microsoft bloggers. Alphabet soup on the Office Communicator blog. Sample sentence: "OCPE uses AutoDiscover and EWS on the CAS servers." Alfred Thompson points...
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The introduction of whimsical teasing in Comic Chat
A few months after my post on the sad demise of whimsical teasing in Comic Chat, I received a piece of email from none other than the author of Comic Chat, DJ Kurlander: I was the person that started...
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The funniest joke I've ever told (to a three-year-old)
I've tested this joke on several children ages three and four, and it never fails. There were two kittens walking down the street, and one of them fell on its butt! I developed this joke for one of my...
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Windows is not a .NET Framework delivery channel either
We learned a while ago that Windows is not an MFC delivery channel. And, since you asked, it's not a .NET Framework delivery channel either. If you're developing a program that uses the .NET...
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Lock-free algorithms: Choosing a unique value (warm-up)
Here's a snippet of code whose job is to generate a unique number within the process. Here's some reference reading to get yourself in the mood. Caution: It may or may not be useful. dwUniqueId =...
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Lock-free algorithms: The singleton constructor
The first half may be familiar to many (most?) readers, but there's an interesting exercise at the bottom. A very useful pattern for the Interlocked* functions is lock-free lazy initialization via...
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Lock-free algorithms: Choosing a unique value (solutions)
Last time, I left a warm-up exercise consisting of a code fragment which tries to compute a unique process-wide value. Here it is again: dwUniqueId = InterlockedCompareExchange(&g_dwUniqueId,...
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Lock-free algorithms: The one-time initialization
A special case of the singleton constructor is simply lazy-initializing a bunch of variables. In a single-threaded application you can do something like this: // suppose that any valid values for a...
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Lock-free algorithms: The singleton constructor (answer to exercises)
A few days ago, I asked you to make an existing class multithread-safe. The class caches objects called SINGLETONINFO which are indexed by a 32-bit ID. The cache is implemented as an array that...
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Patterns for using the InitOnce functions
Since writing lock-free code is is such a headache-inducer, you're probably best off making some other people suffer the headaches for you. And those other people are the kernel folks, who have...
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Holding down the shift key when right-clicking lets you pin things to the...
Holding the shift key when calling up a context menu is a convention for indicating that you want to see additional advanced options which are normally hidden. One of those options is Pin to Start...
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Lock-free algorithms: The try/commit/(try again) pattern
The singleton constructor pattern and the InterlockedMultiply example we saw some time ago are really special cases of the more general pattern which I'll call try/commit/(try again). I don't know if...
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