CodeGuru Staff

Starting with the Shell Update Release (SUR) that shipped with Internet Explorer 4.0 more than three years ago, Microsoft introduced the concept of a unified view to blur the distinction between local and Web content. By activating the Active Desktop (AD) mode, you enable some Web content to appear on your desktop as well as […]

There are many reasons to log what users do throughout the shell. You may need logging for the applications’ sake, to reverse-engineer possible crashes or blocking errors, or to monitor the user’s activity. The key tool that allows for this is a fairly simple, and definitely underestimated, COM interface called IShellExecuteHook. Write a COM object […]

There are things in software development that seem to scare otherwise intrepid and bold programmers. Although it’s definitely an obvious and straightforward technique, when confronted with it you’re instantly suspicious and mistrustful. This is the common feeling that programmers worldwide share about using cascading and bitmapped shell extension context menus. Showing a custom child pop-up […]

In my previous column , I began a 2-part discussion on COM security by introducing launch permissions and access permissions. COM uses launch permissions to decide whether to allow or disallow remote activation requests, and it uses access permissions to determine who’s allowed to make method calls to remote server processes. Failure to take launch […]

Next to threading and apartments, security is the part of COM that seems to cause developers the most pain. Nearly everyone’s first experience with DCOM is to attempt to launch a remote COM server, only to be met with an E_ACCEESSDENIED error. E_ACCESSDENIED may be the most hated HRESULT in all of COM, because it […]

In my previous column, I described the hows and whys of COM apartments. If you read it, you now know that when a thread calls COM’s CoInitialize or CoInitializeEx function, that thread is placed in an apartment. And you know that when an object is created, it, too, is placed in an apartment, and that […]

Let me begin my inaugural column for CodeGuru by stating that I’m on a crusade-a crusade to stamp out bugs related to COM concurrency. COM features a concurrency mechanism that’s capable of intercepting and serializing concurrent method calls to objects that were designed to process only one method call at a time. That mechanism centers […]

Environment: VC++ 6.0 Overview From my experimence, it’s always a pain to implement sink interface with MFC wizard. But ATL is much more straightforward and easy to do the same job. Thanks to the new VC++ 6.0 wizard, we can add ATL to MFC project now. So we can implement the sink interface using ATL […]

As engineers and computer folks, we all like to figure out how things work. We just can’t leave well enough alone, we have to poke and prod at things until we can see exactly how the implementers did it. While we sometimes pull things apart just out of curiosity, sometimes we have to get in […]

Before I start, I just want to issue a quick disclaimer that I used to work at NuMega and was on the teams who wrote BoundsChecker versions 3, 4, and 5. Other products that compete with BoundsChecker, such as Rational’s Purify, are very good and deserve your consideration. Obviously, I am quite partial to BoundsChecker […]

Before I start, I just want to issue a quick disclaimer that I used to be in the Driver Group at NuMega and was on the SoftICE team. Obviously, I am quite partial to SoftICE and I just feel that you should be aware of that fact up front. While it might seem a little […]

Environment: NT4 SP6, Win 2000 SP1, Visual C++ 6.0 Overview This program allows you to execute applications on remote systems without installing any client software. You can start a command prompt or just execute a command or exe  on a remote machine. The only restriction is you must be an administrator 🙁 Everybody knows the […]