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August 2003 - Posts

Sunday, August 31, 2003 12:46 PM

Setup could not verify integrity of file

What this error means and how to fix it.
Posted by oldnewthing | (Comments Off)
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Friday, August 29, 2003 7:00 AM

Painting only when your window is visible on the screen

How to stop wasting CPU cycles on something the user can't see anyway.
Posted by oldnewthing | 6 Comments
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Thursday, August 28, 2003 12:16 PM

Hardware backwards compatibility

Backwards compatibility applies not only to software. It also applies to hardware. And when hardware goes bad, the software usually takes the blame.
Posted by oldnewthing | 11 Comments
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Wednesday, August 27, 2003 11:35 AM

Why are these unwanted files/folders opening when I log on?

Troubleshooting unwanted files/folders opening at logon.
Posted by oldnewthing | 5 Comments
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Wednesday, August 27, 2003 11:09 AM

What are all these files in my C:\WINDOWS\CSC directory?

This is where Windows caches your Offline Files.
Posted by oldnewthing | 12 Comments
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Wednesday, August 27, 2003 10:16 AM

What are those little overlay icons?

The overlays you may see in Explorer and what they mean.
Posted by oldnewthing | 3 Comments
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Tuesday, August 26, 2003 3:16 AM

Rotating the Z-order

How to lay out your dialog to obtain the desired Z-order while preserving a sensible TAB order.
Posted by oldnewthing | 1 Comments
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Monday, August 25, 2003 11:40 AM

Windows brings out the Rorschach test in everyone

It seems that no matter what you do, somebody will get offended.
Posted by oldnewthing | 10 Comments
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Friday, August 22, 2003 12:37 PM

Knitting a pumpkin

Gives you something to do while waiting for the bus.
Posted by oldnewthing | 3 Comments
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Friday, August 22, 2003 8:41 AM

Why isn't my time zone highlighted on the world map?

Geopolitics is a very sensitive subject.
Posted by oldnewthing | 35 Comments
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Thursday, August 21, 2003 9:30 AM

The secret life of GetWindowText

GetWindowText() is more complicated than you think. The documentation tries to explain its complexity with small words, which is great if you don't understand long words, but it also means that you're not getting the full story. Here's an attempt to give the full story.
Posted by oldnewthing | 3 Comments
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Wednesday, August 20, 2003 10:24 AM

What is in the "Windows 95 Special Edition" box?

At the Windows 95 Launch and at various other marketing events, guests were given a copy of "Windows 95 Special Edition". What is so special about the box? Answer: The box.
Posted by oldnewthing | 2 Comments
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Tuesday, August 19, 2003 11:06 AM

Lessons from the trenches

Lessons I learned from working in product support the past few days.
Posted by oldnewthing | 1 Comments
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Monday, August 18, 2003 3:14 PM

There will be a part 9 in the scrollbar series

But it's not finished yet. I hope to get to it later this week.
Posted by oldnewthing | 1 Comments
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Monday, August 18, 2003 11:31 AM

Why does Windows 95 have functions called BEAR, BUNNY and PIGLET?

If you dig back into your Windows 95 files, you'll find that some internal system functions are given names like BEAR35, BUNNY73 and PIGLET12. Surely there is a story behind these silly names, isn't there? Of course there is.
Posted by oldnewthing | 16 Comments
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Saturday, August 16, 2003 9:38 PM

A day in the trenches

Raymond spends the day doing product support.
Posted by oldnewthing | 7 Comments
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Friday, August 15, 2003 9:08 PM

Answer to exercise

The WM_SIZING handler intercepts only interactive resizing.
Posted by oldnewthing | 0 Comments
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Thursday, August 14, 2003 7:41 PM

Windows 95 doesn't boot with more than 1GB of RAM

The inner workings of the Windows 95 memory manager's bootstrap algorithm.
Posted by oldnewthing | 12 Comments
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Wednesday, August 13, 2003 3:04 PM

Scrollbars part 8 - Integral interactive resizing

Tweaking the resize feedback.
Posted by oldnewthing | 0 Comments
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Tuesday, August 12, 2003 12:09 PM

Why can't I remove "for test/evaluation purposes only"?

It's there to protect you from yourself.
Posted by oldnewthing | 3 Comments
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Monday, August 11, 2003 1:41 PM

Scrollbars part 7 - Integrality

If you play around with resizing the window, you can get a fractional line to appear at the bottom of the screen. This is not normally a problem until you scroll to the very end of the list, say, by pressing the End key, at which point an ugly blank space
Posted by oldnewthing | 0 Comments
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Monday, August 11, 2003 1:37 PM

Answers to exercises

What is the significance of the (int) cast in the computation of dLines ? It isn't. I got the question wrong. The real question should have been "What is the significance of the (int) cast in the computation of g_iWheelCarryover ?" The answer is to ensure
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Friday, August 08, 2003 4:44 PM

Why is a registry file called a "hive"?

Useless trivia day. Why is a registry file called a "hive"? Because one of the original developers of Windows NT hated bees.  So the developer who was responsible for the registry snuck in as many bee references as he could.  A registry file
Posted by oldnewthing | 9 Comments
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Thursday, August 07, 2003 3:32 PM

A subtlety in the keyboard code

I neglected to call it out explicitly in the text for Part 5:  Notice that I use cRepeat to determine how many lines/pages to scroll.  This allows us to scroll the correct amount even if we are falling behind on input processing and are missing
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Thursday, August 07, 2003 3:29 PM

Scrollbars bart 6 - The wheel

The mouse wheel is tricky because the mouse wheel UI guidelines indicate that you should scroll by a user-specified amount for each "click" of the mouse, where one click is WHEEL_DELTA mouse units (called a "detent"). There are two subtle points about
Posted by oldnewthing | 4 Comments
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Thursday, August 07, 2003 12:35 AM

Limitations on DLL resources in Windows 95

Ancient history lesson. When Win9x loads a 32-bit DLL, it creates a shadow 16-bit DLL so 16-bit code (like USER) can access resources in it. The shadow DLL is effectively a resource-only 16-bit DLL, created by taking the 32-bit resources and converting
Posted by oldnewthing | 1 Comments
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Tuesday, August 05, 2003 8:32 AM

Keyboard accessibility for scrollbars

Note that so far, the scrollbar is accessible only with the mouse. Our next step is to add keyboard access to the scrollbar. Fortunately, this is not all that difficult. We merely map some keystrokes to equivalent scrollbar actions. void OnKey(HWND hwnd,
Posted by oldnewthing | 3 Comments
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Tuesday, August 05, 2003 12:45 AM

Changing the Windows boot logo

Why you shouldn't do it
Posted by oldnewthing | 12 Comments
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Tuesday, August 05, 2003 12:42 AM

Answer to previous exercise

If you look at the WM_VSCROLL message, you'll see that the scroll position is a 16-bit value. So if the number of entries is more then 65535, you won't be able to use the scroll thumb to get to the ones at the end. Try it: Change the value of g_cItems
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