The Old New Thing

The forgotten common controls: The GetEffectiveClientRect function

November 23, 2007 Nov 23, 2007 11/23/07
Raymond Chen
The function is another one in the category of functions that everybody tries to pretend doesn't exist. It's not as bad as , but it's still pretty awful. The idea behind the function is that you have a frame window with a bunch of optional gadgets, such as a status bar or toolbar. The important thing is that these optional gadgets all ...

When in doubt, consult the online Magic 8 Ball

November 22, 2007 Nov 22, 2007 11/22/07
Raymond Chen
On our team's web site, buried among the other debugging documents, was a page titled simply "Magic 8 Ball"®¹. If you visited it, you got a dark blue circle with a lighter-blue triangle, on which appeared white text with a randomly-chosen message. The messages were things like It was fun to give the 8-ball a shake, but the real ...

Hidden gotcha: The command processor's AutoRun setting

November 21, 2007 Nov 21, 2007 11/21/07
Raymond Chen
If you type at a command prompt, the command processor will spit out pages upon pages of strange geeky text. I'm not sure why the command processor folks decided to write documentation this way rather than the more traditional manner of putting it into MSDN or the online help. Maybe because that way they don't have to deal with annoying ...

Dreyer's Berry Rainbow Sherbet

November 20, 2007 Nov 20, 2007 11/20/07
Raymond Chen
Okay, we have Dreyer's Berry Rainbow Sherbet. Our Berry Rainbow Sherbet combines the tangy fruit taste of blackberry, raspberry and orange sherbets to create a delicious, refreshing treat. Orange is a berry...

You even have to watch out for your placeholder bitmaps

November 20, 2007 Nov 20, 2007 11/20/07
Raymond Chen
During the betas of Windows Vista, the final set of sample logon pictures had yet to be determined, so a bunch of placeholder bitmaps were created. These placeholders consisted of the letters FPO in a box. FPO is a standard term in desktop publishing; it stands for For Position Only. In order to permit designers to perform page layout ...

Darkon: A Larping Documentary

November 19, 2007 Nov 19, 2007 11/19/07
Raymond Chen
My friend ::Wendy:: has many circles of friends, and several of them converged at the Elephant and Castle Pub in Seattle last week for her send-off party, resulting in a night-long game of Venn Diagram as you tried to work out which groups intersected how. I got to meet in person some of ::Wendy::'s blogger friends, including Jennifer (...

If you want a menu that shows the contents of the My Computer folder, you already know how to do it

November 19, 2007 Nov 19, 2007 11/19/07
Raymond Chen
Commenter praful asks what to me is a rather confused question, but I'll try to guess what the real question is. If you drag My Computer to the Start button in XP, you get an expanding menu that lets you see all files and folders as submenus. Is this menu available to applications via an API, or do you have to build it yourself? For ...

In Windows XP, even when DEP is on, it's still sometimes off

November 16, 2007 Nov 16, 2007 11/16/07
Raymond Chen
As we saw last time, there are a variety of ways you can control DEP, one of which is to turn it on for all system processes. But even if you turn on DEP, it still sometimes turns itself off temporarily. It goes back to those bad versions of ATL. The application compatibility team found that there were so many programs written with ...