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The C runtime library cannot be mixed and matched
In 2011, a customer had an application written in C++ with Visual Studio 2003 that consumes a static library provided by a third party, let's call it contoso.lib. Now, contoso.lib is a static library...
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How do I run a Web search in the user's default Web browser using their...
More than one customer has asked, "How do I run a Web search in the user's default Web browser using their default search provider?" Nobody knows for sure. Windows does define a mechanism for...
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A process inherits its environment from its parent, and the consequences of...
A customer reported that they changed some system-level enviornment variables (include PATH). They also have a batch file that, among other things, runs a program that requires that the PATH be set a...
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Why doesn't GetAddrInfo work from behind a proxy?
A customer was having a problem with the GetAddrInfo function when running inside a corporate proxy environment. We are trying to get the IP address of, say, www.microsoft.com by using the...
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How can I start my service as soon as possible, before any other service?
A customer wanted to know how they could make their service start before any other service. FIRST! Of course, a simple application of the What if two programs did this? principle shows that this is...
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Why are there all these processes lingering near death, and what is keeping...
A customer (via their customer liaison) asked for assistance debugging a failure that occurs when their system remains up for several weeks. The customer seems to have a complicated system where they...
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How can I tell if Windows Update is waiting for the system to reboot?
Today's Little Program shows how to ask whether Windows Update is waiting for the system to reboot. You might want to check this in your installer, so that you don't try to install your program while...
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Thanks for informing us that you know about the compatibility issue in your...
During the public prerelease period of a version of Windows some time ago, I remember a bug came in from an application developer. It went something like this: Hi, we just tried our program on the...
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It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway:...
A security vulnerability report arrived that took the following form: I have discovered a critical security vulnerability in Windows which I intend to present at the XYZ conference. It allows any user...
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How do I call SetTimer with a timer ID that is guaranteed not to conflict...
Suppose you want to create a timer for a window, but you don't know what timers that window already has running. You don't want your timer to overwrite any existing timer, so you need to find a unique...
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Why doesn't my keyboard hook get called for keyboard messages I manually posted?
A customer was generating synthesized keyboard input by posting WM_KEYDOWN and related messages to a window. They found that a WH_KEYBOARD keyboard hook was not triggering for these keyboard messages...
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What happens to lost timer messages if I don't process them fast enough?
Some time ago, I noted that if your WM_TIMER handler takes longer than the timer period, your queue will not fill up with WM_TIMER messages. The WM_TIMER message is generated on demand, and if your...
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The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain...
Just like users, machines have domain accounts. And just like user accounts, machine accounts have passwords. And just like user account passwords, machine account passwords expire (by default, every...
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Why can't I create a file equal to the available disk space?
A customer was trying to exercise some boundary cases in their application, one of which entailed "out of disk space" scenarios. The way they did this was very simple: Call GetDiskFreeSpaceEx to...
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If you can't remember the exact text of a dialog box (so you can search for...
Some time ago, I noted that If you're looking for the code that displays a particular dialog box, the most directly way to find it is to look for the dialog box. That works if you have a screen shot...
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Calling ShutdownBlockReasonCreate from my service doesn't stop the user from...
A customer had a service application that needs to perform a sequence of operations that cannot be interrupted by a system shutdown. The service starts performing those operations when it starts up,...
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Hacking the law: On the role of the marriage officiant in the State of...
The role of the officiant in marriages in the State of Washington is kind of strange. For example, the wedding license is filled out in triplicate. One copy goes to the couty clerk. The second copy...
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How do I obtain the comment for a share?
Today's Little Program obtains the comment string for a share. This is what shows up in the net view output like this: C:\>>net view \\scratch Shared resources at \\scratch Share name Type Used...
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First, try reading the error message, episode 4: Even programmers see error...
Same story, different details. It's the same internal programmer's tool which I have been calling Program Q. Many people have written scripts that help to manage your q tables. I'm trying to fribble...
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How do we change permissions on a share as fast as Explorer does it?
A customer wanted to know what they could do to speed up changing permissions on a share. We have a large share (over 50,000 files in over 5000 folders). If we have four or five users with access to...
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