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If you're looking for the code that displays a particular dialog box, the...
Suppose you are working in a large or unfamiliar code base and you want to know where the code is that displays a particular dialog box or message box or something. Probably the most direct way of...
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Some reasons not to do anything scary in your DllMain, part 3
In the same week, the shell team was asked to investigate two failures. The first one was a deadlock in Explorer. The participating threads look like this: Thread 1 called FreeLibrary on a shell...
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Why does the OpenThread function behave differently when the target thread...
A customer discovered strange behavior in the OpenThread function and wondered whether it was expected. We use the OpenThread function to obtain a thread handle with...
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Dispelling the myths, rumors, and innuendo surrounding the...
The QueryPerformanceCounter function has been the subject of much rumor and innuendo. In response to all the confusion, the kernel folks put together a page which tries to settle the controversy...
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How do I read the "Double-click to open an item (single-click to select)"...
Today's Little Program reports whether the Double-click to open an item (single-click to select) option is selected in the Folder Options dialog. A customer wanted to know how to do this, presumably...
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It's time we face reality, my friends: We're not rocket scientists
During the development of Windows 95, it was common for team members to pay visits to other teams to touch base and let them know what's been happening on the Windows 95 side of the project. It was...
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Where does the Installed Updates control panel get the install date from?
A corporate customer wanted to know where the Installed Updates control panel gets the Installed On information from, because they found that the values were always set to the current date regardless...
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Taking advantage of the fact that the handle returned when you create a...
A customer wanted some help deciding what security attributes to place on an event object intended to be used by multiple security contexts. We have two processes, call them A and B, running in...
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How can I detect that a user's SID has changed and recover their old data?
A customer maintained a database which recorded information per user. The information in the database is keyed by the user's SID. This works out great most of the time, but there are cases in which a...
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It's a trap! Employment documents that require you to violate company policy
One of my colleagues had a previous job involving tuning spam filters and removing objectionable content. Before he could start, he was told that he had to sign a special release. The form said...
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Who wrote the text for the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog in Windows 3.1?
One of the differences between standard-mode Windows and enhanced-mode Windows was what happened when you hit Ctrl+Alt+Del. Since 16-bit Windows applications are co-operatively multi-tasked, it is...
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Why does the timestamp of a file increase by up to 2 seconds when I copy it...
We saw some time ago that the FAT file system records timestamps in local time to only two-second resolution. This means that copying a file to a FAT-formatted device (typically a floppy drive or a...
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Aha, I have found a flaw in the logic to detect whether my program is running...
Some time ago, I described how to detect programmatically whether you are running on 64-bit Windows, and one of the steps of the algorithm was "If you are a 64-bit program, then you are running on...
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You can use a file as a synchronization object, too
A customer was looking for a synchronization object that had the following properties: Can be placed in a memory-mapped file. Can be used by multiple processes simultaneously. Bonus if it can even be...
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Piping to notepad
In honor of NotepadConf's new KickStarter video, today's Little Program takes its stdin and puts it in a Notepad window. using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Windows.Automation; using...
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The wisdom of seventh graders: The emergency survival kit
As a precursor to reading a story about survival, seventh grade students were asked to come up with a list of things they would want to have in their emergency survival kit. Students were specifically...
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Steve Ballmer did not write the text for the blue screen of death
Somehow, it ended up widely reported that Steve Ballmer wrote the blue screen of death. And all of those articles cited my article titled "Who wrote the text for the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog in Windows...
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I wrote the original blue screen of death, sort of
We pick up the story with Windows 95. As I noted, the blue Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog was introduced in Windows 3.1, and in Windows 95; it was already gone. In Windows 95, hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del called up a...
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The history of Win32 critical sections so far
The CRITICAL_SECTION structure has gone through a lot of changes since its introduction back oh so many decades ago. The amazing thing is that as long as you stick to the documented API, your code is...
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A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth: The continuing saga of the...
HN has been the only major site to report the history of the Windows 3.1 Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog correctly. But it may have lost that title due to this comment thread. I read here that Steve Ballmer wrote...
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