Windows spotlight not working

Windows spotlight

 Windows spotlight is responsible for those nice aesthetic pictures on the logon screen. Somehow it was broken on my machine and I was deprived of this feature. Even when one selected the option (under 'settings', 'personalization' 'lock screen'), it would jump to normal picture mode. 

 Google didn't help at first (their search results become worse and worse over the years) until I got the tip from 'Software Test Tips': some necessary background apps where disabled. After enabling the app 'settings' (under 'settings'; 'privacy'; 'background apps') rebooting and waiting some time it works now.

Unicode characters and ADO Jet.OleDB

Problem

 The other day we had a problem that databases with Chinese characters couldn't be opened with ADO. I am pretty sure this has worked years ago but that was probably Windows 7 back then. 

Example code

#include "tappch.hpp"
#include <cassert>
#include <comutil.h>
#include <filesystem>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <tchar.h>

#import "msado15.dll"  rename("EOF", "EndOfFile")

namespace
{
   const _bstr_t     g_bstrEmpty;
   constexpr wchar_t g_szDbTest[]   = _T("WL11-旷场.evxt.mdb");
   constexpr wchar_t g_szProvider[] = _T("Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source='");
  
   std::wstring MakeConnectionStringOleDb(const std::filesystem::path& rpthDatabase)
   {
      const std::wstring strConnection = g_szProvider 
                                       + rpthDatabase.wstring()
                                       + _T("';Persist Security Info=False");
                                       
       return strConnection;
   }
}


int main()
{
   HRESULT hr = ::CoInitialize(nullptr);
      
   try
   {
      ADODB::_ConnectionPtr ptrConnection;   
      hr = ptrConnection.CreateInstance(__uuidof(ADODB::Connection));
         
      const _bstr_t bstrConnection = MakeConnectionStringOleDb(g_szDbTest).c_str();
      hr = ptrConnection->Open(bstrConnection, g_bstrEmpty, g_bstrEmpty, ADODB::adConnectUnspecified);
         
      const long n = ptrConnection->State;
         
      hr = ptrConnection->Close();
   }
   catch (const _com_error& re)
   {
      std::cout << re.Description() << std::endl;
   }
      
   ::CoUninitialize();
      
   return 0;
}

 I was trying to track down the bug in Visual Studio by spitting through assembly code of the Windows DLL of ADO and OleDB. Visual Studio tough crashed suddenly and it took all my carefully created breakpoint locations with it. So I gave up and assume a bug.

 

FILE_ATTRIBUTE_UNPINNED

GetFileAttributes

 The other day I encountered an assert in some external library code. The code asserted that the high DWORD bits of the file attribute (from GetFileAttributes) should be zero. The file attribute value was 0x00100020. 

 It turned out that the high part comes from a file attribute defined in 'winnt.h':

#define FILE_ATTRIBUTE_UNPINNED             0x00100000

  This file attribute is not described in MSDN (yet). It seems to be related to 'OneDrive'.