Showing results for September 2012 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

A customer wanted to invoke a command on multiple items at once. I have an , and I want to invoke a verb with that array as the parameter. I know that I can invoke a verb on a single by the code below, but how do I pass an entire array? The function invokes the command by extracting the pidl, then asking to invoke the command on the pidl...

It just writes data.

He's now the head demo-monkey/cheerleader for Windows Phone, but back in the old days, Joe Belfiore was the head demo-monkey/cheerleader for the Windows 95 user interface design. A team-wide meeting was held to show off the new interface that they had developed. Wow look, we have a Start menu (though it wasn't known by that name yet), a taskb...

Dewi Morgan reinterpreted a question from a Suggestion Box of times past as "How do you deal with an input stream that may or may not contain Unicode data?" A related question from Dave wondered how applications that use to store data could ensure that the data is interpreted in the same code page by the recipient. "If I send a .txt file to a per...

I still enjoy dropping in on Why Was I Banned? every so often, but not being a l33t Xbox haxxor, I don't understand a lot of the terminology. Fortunately, some of my colleagues were kind enough to explain them to me. (And now I'm explaining them to you so that you don't have to look as stupid asking them.) A modded lobby is a pre-game lobby (a se...

A customer observed that once the user visited their shell extension, Explorer ran really slowly. (Actually, it took a while just to get to this point, but I'll skip the early investigations because they aren't relevant to the story.) Some investigation showed that Explorer's tree view was calling into the shell extension, which was in turn hanging...

In a discussion of the now-vestigial parameter to the function, Neil asks, "Weren't there sufficient API differences (e.g. WM_CTLCOLOR) between Win16 and Win32 to justify changing the definitions to eliminate the superfluous handle?" The goal of Win32 was to provide as much backward compatibility with existing 16-bit source code as can be pra...

Starting in Windows 2000 and continuing through Windows Vista, you could drag a folder out of Explorer and slam it into the edge of the screen. When you let go, it docked itself to that edge of the screen like a toolbar. A customer noticed that this stopped working in Windows 7 and asked, "Was this feature dropped in Windows 7, ...

The ground rules for the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma include the usual things you might expect. "No pets." "Do not feed the animals." "No smoking." But then there's a rule that clearly is one about which somebody somewhere in the world can say "They have to say that because of me":

A customer liaison asked why their customer's Windows 7 machines could run Magnifier only in Docked mode. Full Screen and Lens mode were disabled. The customer liaison was unable to reproduce the problem on a physical machine, but was able to reproduce it in a virtual machine. Full Screen and Lens mode require that desktop composition be ena...