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How do you intercept taskbar notification balloons?
A customer wanted to know how they could monitor and intercept taskbar notification balloons. In particular, they wanted to intercept the clicks on a particular balloon and take alternative action....
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Turning off the disco lights on the Start screen
On the Windows 8 Start screen, you can pan left and right, and if you are using touch, you can whip the entire screen left and right and send all your tiles flying past. One of the effects we saw when...
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Disabling the PrtSc key by blocking input
A customer asked how to disable the PrtSc key in the On-Screen Keyboard. There is no way to disable the PrtSc key in the On-Screen Keyboard. The On-Screen Keyboard shows a keyboard, and you can click...
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That fee was so that we wouldn't have to raise our prices
I dreamed that I got screwed by Ticketmaster. I was relieved when I woke up and found out it was only a dream. Bonus chatter: The economics of Ticketmaster. It reminds me of a company who added a...
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Why doesn't the New Folder command work in the root of a redirected drive...
When you connect to another computer via Remote Desktop, you have the option of injecting your local drives into the remote computer, known as Device and Resource Redirection. These injected drives...
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Tales from "The Box": A survey of crackpots in physics
David Dixon, assistant professor of physics at Saddleback College, gave a presentation while he was at California Polytechnic State University titled Tales from "The Box", in which he presents...
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Whether your application should display its content in RTL should be based on...
A customer had the following puzzle: We have a small bootstrapper application that consists of a dialog box and a few message boxes. The problem is that we want our application to work properly on...
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How do I display an RTL string in a notification balloon on an LTR system?
Suppose you have a program that is written in Arabic or Hebrew and you want to render some text. No problem. You just call ExtTextOut and pass the ETO_RTLREADING flag to say, "Please render this...
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Wouldn't the Recycle Bin sample program have been simpler without COM?
Steve Wolf suggests that the sample program would have been much simpler had the shell extension model been a flat Win32 interface. Okay, let's try it. Since this is an extension model, each extension...
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Creating custom tasks on a jump list
Today's Little Program adds a custom task to the application's jump list. Take the scratch program and make the following changes. (Remember, Little Programs do very little error checking because...
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That doesn't sound like South Frisian to me
I dreamed that I was back in college taking a course in South Frisian, but I suspected something was up because the words didn't sound Germanic at all, and we were taught the words to a Christmas...
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Essays from the funniest man in Microsoft Research
James Mickens has written a number of essays for ;login: magazine. The wall-of-text presentation is kind of scary, and the first time I encountered them, I skimmed the essays rather than reading them...
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The chain of stories triggered by seeing a package of Ahoj-Brause
While surfing the Web aimlessly doing valuable background research, I happened across a page that had a picture of a package of Ahoj-Brause (pronounced ahoy browse-uh). Seeing that package triggered a...
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Why is GetWindowLongPtr returning a garbage value on 64-bit Windows?
A customer was running into problems with their application on 64-bit Windows 8. They claimed that on Windows 8, the GetWindowLongPtr is returning a garbage pointer, which causes their program to...
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I think we're going to be getting frozen leftovers for lunch today
There are a few times a year when a large fraction of employees are out on vacation at the same time, such as a single work day wedged between a holiday and a weekend (as happened this year on July...
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Brief Q&A on the HeapEnableTerminationOnCorruption heap information flag
Question: What type of heaps are controlled by the HeapEnableTerminationOnCorruption flag? Answer: Any user-mode heap created by the HeapCreate function. This includes the process heap...
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How can I get the list of programs the same way that Programs and Features...
A customer wanted to get the list of programs the same way that the Programs and Features folder gets it. Here, here's an idea: Instead of trying to mimic the Programs and Features folder, just ask...
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There's no seating up there, so you just have to hang on for dear life
I dreamed that through a friend, I got to join a handful of other people atop Prince Charles's carriage as it wound its way through London. There was no seating up there, so you just have to hang on...
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New Year's Eve is sometimes a stressful occasion
Today is New Year's Eve, another opportunity for to mark that an approximately-integral number of revolutions of the earth have occurred since some point in time that wasn't even calculated correctly...
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2013 year-end link clearance
Another round of the semi-annual link clearance. Testing informercial workout systems. Understanding the Galaga No-Fire cheat. Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600. Reasons My Son Is...
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