The Weird and The Wonderful

Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter16-Oct-13 21:47

Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter

16-Oct-13 21:47

It is in Polish!!!

I'm not questioning your powers of observation; I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is (V).

Lutosław16-Oct-13 22:03

Lutosław

16-Oct-13 22:03

Uhm, WHAT is in polish? "zm_prieb"? These "names" are meaningless abbreviations of names in polish. No docs of course...

Greetings - Jacek

Argonia16-Oct-13 23:28

Argonia

16-Oct-13 23:28

Jacek Gajek wrote:
cpar1
cpar2
cpar3
cpar4
cpar5
cpar6
cpar7
cpar8
cpar9

I am pretty sure they switched the positions of 2 of the letters Laugh | :laugh:

Microsoft ... the only place where VARIANT_TRUE != true

Nicholas Marty17-Oct-13 4:30

Nicholas Marty

17-Oct-13 4:30

That's called obfuscation!!! Laugh | :laugh:

phil.o18-Oct-13 4:12

phil.o

18-Oct-13 4:12

How dare you blame someone because you don't know what a ztlgpu is? Poke tongue | ;-P

No memory stick has been harmed during establishment of this signature.

Executable that requires elevation

Lutosław19-Oct-13 5:18

Lutosław

19-Oct-13 5:18

Actually I know what is it, but telling it would require some inappropriate words.

Greetings - Jacek

Had a Boss

michaelbarb14-Nov-13 8:58

michaelbarb

14-Nov-13 8:58

I had a boss once that did not believe in comments. He felt names should be descriptive enough that you should be able to read the program and not need them. Who ever wrote this would find all their personal belongings in a brown card board box the next day.

So many years of programming I have forgotten more languages than I know.

Michael Haephrati15-Oct-13 11:21

Michael Haephrati

15-Oct-13 11:21

I recently worked on a project and at a certain point noticed that the executable that is created requires elevation. It has this icon indicating that an administrator approval is required, and when it is double clicked, the elevation prompt appears.
It drove me craze to remove this setting, as the nature of the software didn't require it to be elevated. I looked at the Manifest section when there are settings related to UAC (User Account Control), but even when I matched these settings to the ones taken from another project, which didn't require elevation, my new project did.
Today, while speaking to another programmer, he told me how to fix that....

Well, my executable had the string "install" as part of it, and when I renamed it to demo.exe, the icon has changed and no elevation any more required. Smile | :)

Richard Deeming15-Oct-13 12:11

Richard Deeming

15-Oct-13 12:11

I'm not sure if there's a complete list anywhere, but the heuristics are documented on MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb530410.aspx[^]

Installer Detection only applies to:

32 bit executables
Applications without a requestedExecutionLevel
Interactive processes running as a Standard User with LUA enabled

Before a 32 bit process is created, the following attributes are checked to determine whether it is an installer:

Filename includes keywords like "install," "setup," "update," etc.
Keywords in the following Versioning Resource fields: Vendor, Company Name, Product Name, File Description, Original Filename, Internal Name, and Export Name.
Keywords in the side-by-side manifest embedded in the executable.
Keywords in specific StringTable entries linked in the executable.
Key attributes in the RC data linked in the executable.
Targeted sequences of bytes within the executable.

Note The keywords and sequences of bytes were derived from common characteristics observed from various installer technologies.

"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer

Michael Haephrati15-Oct-13 12:40

Michael Haephrati

15-Oct-13 12:40

Thanks. This is really useful information.

Rage15-Oct-13 22:56

Rage

15-Oct-13 22:56

Richard Deeming wrote:
Filename includes keywords like "install," "setup," "update," etc.

What the elephant ?
It checks for filename or keywords to determine if a file is an installer ? I call this epic fail !

~RaGE();

I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus
Do not feed the troll ! - Common proverb

Dave Kreskowiak16-Oct-13 1:30

Dave Kreskowiak

16-Oct-13 1:30

Yes, it does. Any icons with those words in the names do not show up in the Start menu, even if you pin it.

A guide to posting questions on CodeProject[^]

Dave Kreskowiak

Richard Deeming16-Oct-13 1:45

Richard Deeming

16-Oct-13 1:45

The list of file names you can't pin to the taskbar or start menu is worse than the installer detection heuristics:
http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/2009/Oct/08/Application-that-wont-Pin-to-Taskbar-in-Windows-7[^]

If you exe name contains any of the following, you can't pin it:

Documentation
Help
Install
More Info
Readme
Read me
Read First
Setup
Support
What's New
Remove

"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer

Dan Neely18-Oct-13 7:14

Dan Neely

18-Oct-13 7:14

The alternative to a heuristic like that would have been 99% of installers trying to run as normal processes when Vista launched, failing because they couldn't access privileged areas, and bombing. That would have been an order of magnitude more elephanted up. And not just because setting runs-as-user in a manifest if your app name matches the heuristic is strait forward for a dev; but 99% of lusers don't know there is something called admin mode, never mind how to launch a program in it.

Edit: PS The VS2k3Sp1 installer doesn't get detected to auto elevate and fails/backs out in a way that gives no indication of what's wrong until on the nth try you realize you never got the elevate prompt.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

BillW3318-Oct-13 8:27

BillW33

18-Oct-13 8:27

Yes, there really was no nice clean solution available to them at that point.

Just because the code works, it doesn't mean that it is good code.

BillW3318-Oct-13 8:25

BillW33

18-Oct-13 8:25

That is just epic Microsoft!
Wink | ;)

Just because the code works, it doesn't mean that it is good code.

Rob Grainger23-Oct-13 0:55

Rob Grainger

23-Oct-13 0:55

That seems a very deep quote from Homer, I'm more used to "mmm doughnuts".

"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.

Whats wrong with this code???

Bernhard Hiller15-Oct-13 20:19

Bernhard Hiller

15-Oct-13 20:19

Thanks for sharing this WTF!

Ankush Bansal14-Oct-13 20:50

Ankush Bansal

14-Oct-13 20:50

I was assigned a QA bug today and I found this horror code written by my colleague Mad | :mad:

...

private static double ConvertToDouble(object obj, out bool good)
        {
            if (obj is double || obj is int)
            {
                good = true;
                return (double)obj;
            }

            good = false;
            return double.NaN;
        }

This code exploded in to

CSS

Exception type: InvalidCastException
Message: Specified cast is not valid.
[System.InvalidCastException]

vonb14-Oct-13 20:55

vonb

14-Oct-13 20:55

It failed converting int to double?

The signature is in building process.. Please wait...

Ankush Bansal14-Oct-13 21:13

Ankush Bansal

14-Oct-13 21:13

Yes!!

Actually the question was raised by the same colleague when I told him its wrong.... Big Grin | :-D

Bernhard Hiller14-Oct-13 21:07

Bernhard Hiller

14-Oct-13 21:07

And float and uint are also really bad...

Ankush Bansal14-Oct-13 21:15

Ankush Bansal

14-Oct-13 21:15

Well in theory not... but our middleware doesn't support uint and float so for us (practically) they are bad.