Learn about a comprehensive method of getting the Windows version and differentiate among the various editions.

Did a former Microsoft employee post projected ship dates for upcoming key products like Windows 8?

The new Windows 7 user interface features can offer Web developers significant productivity gains in terms of organizing, finding, and navigating to commonly used resources. This article introduces you to the improvements which can cut significant time from otherwise mundane daily workflow tasks.

Even the best-written C++ applications can crash or hang-and end-users' perceptions of the application hinge on how gracefully the application works with the operating system to handle such problems. By registering your applications with Windows Application Recovery and Restart, they can recover gracefully after errors occur.

Discover how to retrieve device path and device instance id for storage devices attached to the system.

Discover how to retrieve information on your computer's devices including the mouse, keyboard, and other peripherals attached to the system.

Multicore processors bring new challenges. See a solution for gaining the ability to scale to the increasing number and types of processor cores.

Learn how to check whether or not a component is a .NET managed component. Also, learn to get other information, such as dependent assemblies, from the metadata using Microsoft APIs and related COM interfaces.

Learn how to hook a DirectX/COM Interface. The DirectInput interface was used as an example of how to hook an interface function.

Learn the five steps needed to inject your code in a portable executable (EXE, DLL, OCX,...) file without recompiling the source code.

Switch to and create different desktops in a Windows system.

This class is a light wrapper around the Windows system shut down stuff. By using this class you can shut down, restart, or log off either forcefully or normally without worrying about what type of OS it is.

Handling multiple periodic jobs is a common problem in Windows programming. Discover a simple yet powerful set of classes that greatly reduces effort (and headache) required to accomplish this task. (The article, demo project, and source code were updated.)

Discover this simple way to shut down a remote Windows machine by using the InitiateSystemShutdown API function.

Detecting multiple instances of an application in VC++.

Read/write lock is a synchronization mechanism that can be used to efficiently protect a shared resource in an environment with multiple readers and writers. Unlike traditional mutex, read/write lock allows readers to access the resource concurrently.

How to implement an extensible framework for hooking Win32 API functions.

GINA (Graphical Identification and Authentication) is a DLL component that is loaded by the Winlogon executable. This replaceable DLL performs all identification and authentication user interactions. You can use this DLL to add your logo to winlogon's dialog.

Tells how to read / write disk sectors, how to do absolute disk read/write from VC++. The demo project reads specified number of floppy disk sectors from a specified sector and store it to a specified file.

Understand forensic analysis of hard disks using Visual C++, MFC, and systems programming.

Check out this Service API that consists of a set of functions and a couple of callback functions that must be supported. Together, these functions allow an application to run independent of any logged-on user.

Undeleting files is often necessary. This is true even if you have accidentally deleted files from the Recycle Bin or if the files or folders have been purposely tampered with.

See how to edit disk information from your programs.

This article demonstrates an example using hooks.

This article features a HowTo to write, set and make use of system wide hooks.