The 2016/2017 Seattle Symphony subscription season at a glance
For many years, I’ve put together a little pocket guide to the Seattle Symphony subscription season for my symphony friends to help them decide which ticket package they want. For the past several...
View ArticleYou kids are so cute, thinking you invented email
Commenter JT seemed quite astounded that Steve Ballmer sent email. There was no explanation as to the source of the astonishment, but commenter Boris thinks it was surprise that email even existed...
View ArticleHow can I get the name of the function that crashed given just a module name...
The only information a customer had regarding a crash was the following: Faulting application name: Contoso.exe, version: 1.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x4a425e19 Faulting module name: Contoso.exe, version:...
View ArticleAre SetProp and RemoveProp thread-safe?
A customer wanted to know whether the SetProp and RemoveProp functions are thread-safe with respect to a specific window and property. “It seems to work under the debugger, but that doesn’t prove...
View ArticleWhy not auto convert week-based time zone information to date-based?
When I described the two ways that the TIME_ZONE_INFORMATION structure represents the rules for daylight saving time, commenter Voo argued (and I hope I interpreted the message correctly) that either...
View ArticleOn word breaking in Chinese and Japanese
In Western languages, you can generally break a line at whitespace. (You can also break a line within a word, subject to language-specific hyphenation rules, but let’s not get into that.) People...
View ArticleIf what you’re doing is undocumented, it’s not guaranteed to keep working,...
A customer (via their customer liaison) wanted to know how their application can control another application’s common dialogs. They have code that works on Windows XP that extracts the common dialog...
View ArticleString comparisons against program output is not usually the best solution
A customer wanted to know whether the ICACLS program will be deprecated in Windows 10. The reason is that they have a program that modifies file and directory permission, and the way it works is that...
View ArticleCould there be any problems with calling GetModuleFileNameEx on your own...
In response to my discussion of why you can get an ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE from GetModuleFileNameEx even though the process handle is valid, Joshua asks, “Calling such methods as these on your own...
View ArticleOn week numbering in the United States
Continuing the chatter in my earlier discussion of why January 1 is being reported as the last week of the previous year. Commenter Smithers notes a few things, which I will use as my springboard....
View ArticleAdventures in UI Automation: Scraping the Driver Files dialog
If you go to Device Manager, then view the Properties of a device node, and then go to the Driver tab and click Driver Details, you get a dialog box with a list of driver files, and when you click...
View ArticleWhy doesn’t this registry hack for disabling autorun work?
A customer reported that they used a registry hack to disable Autorun, and it doesn’t work. “Do we have any documentation on the above registry key so I can check that they applied it properly?” There...
View ArticleRandomly-generated passwords still have to be legal strings
If you need to generate a password for programmatic use, then you don’t have to worry about generating characters that are difficult or impossible to type on a keyboard. Go ahead and mix Cyrillic with...
View ArticleWhy not use weak linking to solve the retargetable library problem?
In response to the problem of creating a retargetable library, there was disbelief that the Windows linker doesn’t support weak symbols. (I’m assuming they meant “loader”, not “linker”.) Back in the...
View ArticleWhat are the consequences of reserving a huge amount of memory, most of which...
A customer had an idea of solving a program by reserving a huge amount of memory with VirtualAlloc, and then committing only the parts that are actually needed. And by huge, they’re talking about...
View ArticleWere there specific criteria for making a game work at all costs vs. leaving...
Boris asks, “were there specific criteria for making a game work at all costs vs. leaving it be if it had problems too weird to debug?” I don’t recall there being any formal criteria. There was nearly...
View ArticleHow can I find out how much disk space the WinSxS folder is really occupying?
If you ask Explorer or some other disk space utility for the size of the WinSxS folder, you’ll get an inflated value because WinSxS consists mostly of hard links into other parts of Windows, so it...
View ArticleDon’t be helpless: You can find information too, if you try (episode 3)
Sometimes the information you receive regarding the location of a document or other resource is not perfectly correct. I put the script on \\scratch\temp\bob\widgetstuff\enablewidgets.cmd. But then...
View ArticleWhy does PathIsUNC say that paths that begin with \\?\ are not UNCs?
An application vendor opened a bug with the product team saying that the PathIsUNC function was returning incorrect values in Windows Vista. Specifically, the PathIsUNC function was returning...
View ArticleFixing a floating point exception when operating on NaN
A customer had a DLL would sometimes fail to load into certain clients. Further investigation revealed that it failed to load into programs that had enabled floating point exceptions, perhaps...
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