Category Archives: Win32

The Microsoft Windows API.

BluetoothAPIs.h Broken in Windows SDK

Summary The Microsoft Windows SDK versions 7.0 and 7.1 appear to have broken BluetoothAPIs.h header files. Update:  Microsoft has fixed the errors in the Bluetooth header as of SDK version 8.0 for Windows 8. Details So far, I have uncovered … Continue reading

Posted in Technology, Win32, Windows | 2 Comments

The Demise of CAPICOM

CAPICOM, a COM-based wrapper for the CryptoAPI library, is deprecated and on its way out. However, Microsoft has no time line for phasing it out, nor have they provided sufficient documentation of alternatives. Many CAPICOM pages contain a confusing, bright-red … Continue reading

Posted in Authenticode, COM, Cryptography, Technology, Win32 | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

GnuPG Plugin for vim Under Cygwin

GnuPG, GNU Privacy Guard, is a free system for encrypting files, emails, etc. The GnuPG plugin for vim provides automatic encryption and decryption of files within vim. If you attempt to edit a GnuPG-encrypted file with vim, it will prompt … Continue reading

Posted in Cryptography, Technology, Win32 | Leave a comment

CoCreateInstance Fails With “Class Not Registered”

Recently, I had a problem unique to my test machine. Attempting to call CoCreateInstance on a COM class provided by one of our DLLs resulted in HRESULT 0x80040154, which corresponds to “Class not registered”. This was a mystery since regsvr32 … Continue reading

Posted in COM, Technology, Win32, Windows | Leave a comment

SetThreadLocale and SetThreadUILanguage for Localization on Windows XP and Vista

Simple Localization In classic Windows programming, the quickest way to handle localized resources is to put all languages into the same resource file, then use SetThreadLocale to tell Windows that it should return resources tagged with the specified language identifier. … Continue reading

Posted in Technology, Win32 | 1 Comment

Underlining Characters in a ToolTip

My product, a toolbar for Outlook Express, uses tooltips to display keyboard shortcuts. For some localization work, I needed to display an underlined character within a tooltip. The only hint I could find was a reference to .Net tooltips. Apparently, … Continue reading

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Windows Vista UAC Goofiness

Windows Vista UAC is not always a predictable beast. Today I found out that if an executable doesn’t set level=”asInvoker” in its manifest, UAC confirmation will kick in if any of the following substrings appear in the filename: setup install … Continue reading

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