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Redirecting the Favorites folder is technically legal, but you wouldn't like it
A customer liaison asked for assistance in debugging why Internet Explorer frequently stops responding at their customer's site. "We have tried a number of things like clearning the temporary Internet...
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It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway:...
A security report was received that went something like this: A user can bypass file sharing locks by opening a read-only handle to the physical volume containing the file in question. This allows the...
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Communication between moving vehicles during the narrow window of the late 1990s
The long holiday weekend in the United States means that there are probably going to be a lot of people on road trips. Back in the old days before mobile phones, if you had multiple cars traveling...
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Customing the standard color-picker dialog
Today's Little Program does a little bit of customization of the ChooseColor dialog. We do this by, um, doing what the documentation says. For the color dialog, we take the template in color.dlg and...
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How do I turn off email reminders for my Windows Live calendar, and disable...
While having lunch with my colleagues a few days ago, they complained that they get annoying email for all their calendar events. I mentioned, "So turn off the email notifications." "You can do that?"...
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Why are only some of the Windows 7 system notification icons colorless?
André decided to play "gotcha" by noting that not all of the notification icons went colorless and wondered what the criteria was for deciding which ones to make colorless and which ones to make...
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Using the REFIID/void** pattern for returning COM objects for future-proofing...
Suppose you have a function that creates a reference to a COM object: // pixie.h STDAPI CreateShellItemFromPixieDust( const PIXIEDUST *ppd, IShellItem **ppsi); There are a few issues with this design....
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If I duplicate a handle, can I keep using the duplicate after closing the...
A customer asked whether it was okay to use a duplicated handle even after the original handle was closed. Yes. That's sort of why you would duplicate it. Duplicating a handle creates a second handle...
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Enumerating integer compositions (the return of the binomial coefficients)
In number theory, a composition of an integer is an ordered sequence of positive integers which sum to the target value. For example, the value 3 can be written as 3, 1+2, 2+1, or 1+1+1. You can think...
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Why does Outlook map Ctrl+F to Forward instead of Find, like all...
It's a widespread convention that the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut initiates a Find operation. Word does it, Excel does it, Wordpad does it, Notepad does it, Internet Explorer does it. But Outlook...
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How do I configure Windows Update programmatically?
First of all, normal programs shouldn't be messing with Windows Update configuration. That's something the user (or the user's administrator) decides. If you're an IT administrator, then you can use...
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What does it mean when GetQueuedCompletionStatus return ERROR_SEM_TIMEOUT?
A customer asked for assistance interpreting a failure of the GetQueuedCompletionStatus function. We are observing that GetQueuedCompletionStatus is intermittently behaving as follows: The...
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Outdoor Trek: Mirror, Mirror starts this weekend
As previously noted, Outdoor Trek will be staging live performances of the Star Trek episode Mirror, Mirror. The schedule is up. Three weekends starting this Saturday at Blanche Lavizzo Park. Saturday...
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The time one of my colleagues debugged a line-of-business application for a...
Back in the days of Windows 95 development, one of my colleagues debugged a line-of-business application for a major delivery service. This was a program that the company gave to its top-tier...
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How can I get the URL to the Web page the clipboard was copied from?
When you copy content from a Web page to the clipboard and then paste it into OneNote, OneNote pastes the content but also annotates it "Pasted from ...". How does OneNote know where the content was...
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The alternate story of the time one of my colleagues debugged a...
Some people objected to the length, the structure, the metaphors, the speculation, and fabrication. So let's say they were my editors. Here's what the article might have looked like, had I taken their...
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Microspeak: Tell Mode / Ask Mode
As a product nears release, the rate of change slows down, and along the way, the ship room goes through stages known as Tell Mode and Ask Mode. In Tell Mode, any changes to the product do not require...
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When will GetSystemWindowsDirectory return something different from...
Most of the time, the GetWindowDirectory returns the Windows directory. However, as noted in the documentation for GetSystemWindowsDirectory: With Terminal Services, the...
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When I send a WM_GETFONT message to a window, why don't I get a font?
A customer reported that the WM_GETFONT message was not working. Specifically, they sent the message to a window, and they can plainly see that the window is rendering with a particular font, yet the...
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How do I obtain the computer manufacturer's name from C++?
Some time ago, I gave a scripting solution to the problem of obtaining the computer manufacturer and model. But what if you want to do this from C++? I could translate the script into C++, or I could...
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