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Casting from one interface to another...

A co-worker came by to ask what he thought was a coding "style" question that turned into a correctness issue, and I thought I'd share it. Someone had defined two COM interfaces: interface IFoo : IUnknown { HRESULT FooMethod1(); HRESULT FooMethod2(); Read More...
Posted Friday, February 15, 2008 3:11 PM by LarryOsterman | 34 Comments
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The Shell used to get all the cool APIs :)

After I posted my article on the SHAutoComplete , I mentioned it to one of my co-workers. His response "I'm not surprised - The shell gets all the cool APIs". And they do. For instance, my "new favorite" Win32 API : RegGetValue began it's life as the Read More...
Posted Monday, November 05, 2007 10:42 AM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments
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Adding AutoComplete to your edit controls

For whatever reason, most of the toy applications I tend to write seem to end up being dialog based applications. I'm not 100% sure why, it probably has to do with the fact that the dialog box editor makes it really easy to drop controls on a page. One Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 01, 2007 9:17 AM by LarryOsterman | 25 Comments
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"Memory Leak" when using the Vista Audio API notification routines

We recently got an internal report from someone using the internal audio notification APIs that they were leaking memory and they wanted to help from us debugging the problem. I took a look and discovered that the problem was a circular reference that Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 24, 2007 2:40 PM by LarryOsterman | 17 Comments

The Windows command line is just a string...

Yesterday, Richard Gemmell left the following comment on my blog (I've trimmed to the critical part): I was referring to the way that IE can be tricked into calling the Firefox command line with multiple parameters instead of the single parameter registered Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 03, 2007 9:01 AM by LarryOsterman | 30 Comments
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Applet Mitigations - Services.

As a senior developer at Microsoft, you often find yourself participating on a number of v-teams. One of the v-teams I'm on is responsible for approving new services added to Windows. As I've mentioned before, I'm a nutcase about stuff running on my machines, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 22, 2007 5:27 PM by LarryOsterman | 22 Comments

Applet Mitigations

As I've mentioned , applets can be a plague on your system. The annoying thing is that it's possible to write applets that aren't so horrible. And most of the mitigations are really just common sense ideas - there's nothing spectacularly complicated in Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 16, 2007 10:13 AM by LarryOsterman | 25 Comments

It's my computer, dagnabbit, not yours!

I've been wanting to write this one for a while, but continually got sidetracked, but there's no time like the present... Many others (I'm too lazy to chase down references) have commented on the phenomenon known as " bloatware " (also known as "craplets" Read More...
Posted Monday, August 13, 2007 4:46 PM by LarryOsterman | 31 Comments

Hey, my custom shutdown sound got cut off (or didn't play). What's up?

Chris Pirillo had an interesting blog post the other day with the rather uninformative title of " Windows Vista Sound Problems ". He has a reader who built a shutdown sound that is almost 2 minutes long, and that reader is upset that the system isn't Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 02, 2007 4:08 PM by LarryOsterman | 19 Comments

Compatibility works both ways

Windows is rather famous for its ability to run applications that were written for previous versions of the Windows operating system. Volumes have been written about Microsoft's backwards compatibility. On the other hand, people have long criticized Microsoft Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 30, 2007 9:24 AM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments
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What's wrong with this code, part 20: Yet another reason that named synchronization objects are dangerous, the answers

Microsoft can be quite obsessive about instrumentation and metrics. We have a significant body of tools that perform static and dynamic analysis on our operating systems. Some of these tools (for example prefast and FxCop ) are public, some are not. Friday Read More...
Posted Monday, May 14, 2007 12:19 PM by LarryOsterman | 19 Comments

The last change for the cheesy OSD application - preventing volume recursion.

Yesterday , at the close of my article about adding notifications support to the cheesy OSD application, I mentioned that there was one remaining problem. The problem is actually a big deal - as it's written right now, the application can't filter out Read More...
Posted Friday, March 23, 2007 10:12 AM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

Fun with the endpoint volume interfaces - closing the loop

Yesterday, I added support for metering to the cheesy OSD application, today I want to add in the one thing that's been missing: notification of external volume changes. The good news is that once again, it's pretty easy to add support. All you need to Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 22, 2007 9:10 AM by LarryOsterman | 6 Comments

Fun with the endpoint volume interfaces - let's add metering...

Yesterday I posted a quick&dirty OSD (complete with cheesy text graphics). Today I'm going to add support for metering to the application. Start with yesterdays application and add (this is the routine that actually implements the meter): struct TimerContext Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 21, 2007 9:12 AM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments

Other fun things to do with the EndpointVolume interfaces

Last week I posted a code snippet that showed how to change the master volume in Vista . That snippet doesn't really show the coolness that exists within the IAudioEndpointVolume interface. One of my favorite features is the support for OSD's (On Screen Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 20, 2007 9:27 AM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments
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