Just Let It Flow

The C definitions for Direct2D don’t always play nice with Visual Studio, producing crashes and run time check errors and everything. Whatever, they certainly aren’t equivalent to the C++ interface. Time to investigate why.

It’s well known that Visual Studio’s C compiler hasn’t progressed much beyond C89, save for things like variadic macros. What might not be quite as well known is that there are tools out there to help, but they don’t integrate well into the IDE. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to integrate them directly into the compiling process to parse the source files as it goes? What isn’t well known is that you can do that, with compiler plugins.

We haven’t been living under rocks. We know that since XP, Windows has had zip file extraction and creation. what it doesn’t have is a defined API so us normals can leverage it programmatically. But we have ways and means…

CreateConsoleScreenBuffer: what a fabulous function. But wait a minute here. what’s that mysteriously reserved parameter for, and why is there a flags argument for one value with a weasely worded “only supported screen buffer type”? Sounds like there’s something else it can (or at least could) do…

We all know DlMain’s are called when a new thread is launched, but how do you get notifications if you can’t, or plain don’t want to use a dll. Find out how, and without hooking either.

Linux people who have to work in Windows are often talking about the basic tools it has which are absent from Microsoft’s product. While recent developments of Windows are slowly catching up with variously featured versions of whoami, ln, cat, grep, ps and chmod, one app that’s so far evaded the conversion is chroot. Whatever the reason may be for its absence, it is definitely not because there’s is no support mechanism for it.

It doesn’t sound like it should be so hard. I mean, the shell has managed to produce it every time you’ve logged on since Windows XP. MSDN even has a page dedicated to user profiles that includes a section on where it is and how its treated. It details that the users picture lives in their temp directory, except for most times when it doesn’t. The picture will turn up if you open the User Account control panel, but if you’re trying to grab it programatically, asking the user to open Control Panel and all that or even worse, opening it from your own code and killing the window just as quick aren’t fantastic solutions.

We all need ideas. Whether you’ve just finished something, or are getting a little bit bored with your current project you can’t help but let your mind drift to the next cool thing you’ll create. Sometimes the ideas come thick and fast, other times they’re like gold dust. When I’m in the second camp, and reading the various boards I read, I will quite happily steal other peoples.

Follow MsgHookLister on a journey from client request, to fiddling with Windows bits before returning information on active thread and global hooks back to the client who asked for it.