So we all know that char is 8-bit, and wchar_t is 16-bit. (This isn’t always true, but it is on Windows with Microsoft compilers.) Many (nearly all) of the Windows APIs are implemented under the hood in two versions: one supports Unicode (multi-byte characters) and the other supports 8-bit national character sets. These two functions actually have slightly different … Read more
An 8-bit bitmap requires a color table. Since you want grayscale, you have to set up the color table to have 256 levels of gray. You’ve set the first one to black, which is correct, but you haven’t set the rest. BITMAPINFO is actually a variably sized structure. The bmiColors field is just a placeholder … Read more
LPCWSTR stands for “Long Pointer to Constant Wide String”. The W stands for Wide and means that the string is stored in a 2 byte character vs. the normal char. Common for any C/C++ code that has to deal with non-ASCII only strings.= To get a normal C literal string to assign to a LPCWSTR, you need to … Read more
Kernel drivers are programs written against Windows NT’s native API (rather than the Win32 Subsystem’s API) and which execute in kernel mode on the underlying hardware. This means that a driver needs to be able to deal with switching virtual memory contexts between processes, and needs to be written to be incredibly stable — because … Read more
I recently installed Python 3.7 and at the end of the setup, there is the option to “Disable path length limit”. I don’t know whether or not I should do this. What are the pros and cons of doing this? Just from the sound of it you should always disable it.
Return: “To Be Filled By O.E.M.” What does this mean? “To be filled by o.e.m.” is a registration entry that originates in the BIOS and usually indicates you are using a motherboard that you purchased directly from the manufacturer, and then assembled into your own custom machine. Refer: To be filled by o.e.m. problem My processor … Read more
With a debugger you can step through the program assembly interactively.With a disassembler, you can view the program assembly in more detail.With a decompiler, you can turn a program back into partial source code, assuming you know what it was written in (which you can find out with free tools such as PEiD – if … Read more
DWORD is not a C++ type, it’s defined in <windows.h>. The reason is that DWORD has a specific range and format Windows functions rely on, so if you require that specific range use that type. (Or as they say “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”) For you, that happens to correspond to unsigned int, but that might not … Read more
What is a DLL? Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL)s are like EXEs but they are not directly executable. They are similar to .so files in Linux/Unix. That is to say, DLLs are MS’s implementation of shared libraries. DLLs are so much like an EXE that the file format itself is the same. Both EXE and DLLs … Read more