Due to a policy around supporting and encouraging internationalizable software, there are certain system APIs which only have a UNICODE version (functions typically with the W postfix). One example which is missing the plain old ANSI version is the StrCmpLogicalW...

Most of the process related tools we use (bug databases, work items, test cases, etc), will keep track of owners by their email alias. Unfortunately, if someone's alias changes (such as transitioning from contractor to Full Time) or they leave the company...

The COM object model exposed by Microsoft Word gives us the power to save any document which Word can recognize into a PDF file (as long as you've downloaded and installed the XPS and PDF exporter first). And it turns out that programmatically converting...

Using the COM object model exposed by Excel, we can programmatically open files, generate graphs, and save them as stand-alone image files. Handily, the functionality provided by Excel gives us a simple way to generate charts and graphs when you...

I've created and emailed out many automated status reports during my career at Microsoft, consisting of everything from bug reports, to team status mails, to stress crash/uptime reports. And I'm sure that many of them immediately went into the trash....