The Old New Thing

Going for the facts: Who is displaying this message box?

March 20, 2014 Mar 20, 2014 03/20/14

Raymond Chen

A customer wanted to know whether had a problem with Unicode. A problem with it? Quite the contrary. loves Unicode! In fact, if you call the ANSI version, it converts the strings to Unicode and then finishes the work in Unicode. Okay, here's the customer's problem. We have a custom application written in managed code. When we launch ...

How do I show the contents of a directory while respecting the user's preferences for hidden and super-hidden files as well as the user's language preferences?

March 17, 2014 Mar 17, 2014 03/17/14

Raymond Chen

A customer was writing a program in (and this is what they said) "32 bit C++ .Net 4.0" which displayed the contents of a directory, and they wanted to filter out items such as hidden files and protected operating system files (also known as super-hidden files) based on the user's current Explorer preferences. Furthermore, they wanted to show ...

How do I create an IShellItemArray from a bunch of file paths?

March 14, 2014 Mar 14, 2014 03/14/14

Raymond Chen

The interface accepts bulk operations in the form of an . So how do you take a list of file names and convert them into an ? There is no function, but there is a , and we know how to convert a path to an ID list, namely via . So lets snap two blocks together. The template function takes an array of paths and starts by creating a ...

Why does the Directory.GetFiles method sometimes ignore *.html files when I ask for *.htm?

March 13, 2014 Mar 13, 2014 03/13/14

Raymond Chen

The documentation for the method says When using the asterisk wildcard character in a search­Pattern, such as "*.txt", the matching behavior when the extension is exactly three characters long is different than when the extension is more or less than three characters long. A search­Pattern with a file extension of exactly three ...

Programmatically uploading a file to an FTP site

March 10, 2014 Mar 10, 2014 03/10/14

Raymond Chen

Today's Little Program uploads a file to an FTP site in binary mode with the assistance of the Wininet library. This program has sat in my bag of tools for years. The program accepts five command line arguments: site (no "ftp://" in front) userid password path for the file to upload location to place the uploaded file For example, I ...

We’re currently using FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING and FILE_FLAG_WRITE_THROUGH, but we would like our WriteFile to go even faster

March 6, 2014 Mar 6, 2014 03/6/14

Raymond Chen

Actually, those flags make it go slower.

Why do I have to add 1 to the color index when I set it as the hbrBackground of a window class?

March 5, 2014 Mar 5, 2014 03/5/14

Raymond Chen

Our scratch program sets the background color to by setting the class background brush as follows: What's with the ? Okay, first of all, let's backtrack a bit. The real first question is, "What's the deal with taking an integer () and casting it to a and expecting anything sane to happen?" The window manager wants to provide ...

Adventures in automation: Dismissing all message boxes from a particular application but only if they say that the operation succeeded

March 3, 2014 Mar 3, 2014 03/3/14

Raymond Chen

Suppose you have a program that is part of your workflow, and it has the annoying habit of showing a message box when it is finished. You want to automate this workflow, and part of that automation is dismissing the message box. Let's start by writing the annoying program: This annoying program pretends to do work for a little while, and...