Easy but wordy

Have you noticed that Visual Studio's Win32 dialog editor supports adding ActiveX controls? Right click on a dialog surface in a Win32 project, and "Insert ActiveX Control" is right there. But if you do that in a plain vanilla Win32 project, the control won't show up in runtime. Short of MFC or ATL, there is no built-in ActiveX  containment logic for Win32 projects that I know of. Native COM is a great lightweight COM client helper, but no containment there. So, what would it take to host an ActiveX control?

No .NET - no problem

The Microsoft Web Browser control, the tried and true built-in HTML viewer of Windows, does not have a ready made method for loading an HTML document from a text string. Yet its managed wrappers (e. g. System.Windows.Controls.WebBrowser do.

Unicode, circa 1994

Public announcement of the day: on the Objective C++ compiler than ships with Xcode 26.6 (and maybe before, who knows), the option -fshort-wchar is broken, unless you also specify -fno-builtin-wcslen, and it only manifests in release builds. The evidence is overwhelming.

...and naming things

 As the joke goes, naming things is the other hard problem in IT. I think there is one overlooked naming pattern that deserves more love.

VBA.NET, no such thing

 Another day, another lovely point of friction on the managed/native border. I was trying to instantiate and call the .NET class System.Security.Cryptography.HMACSHA256 from an Excel macro.

Polyglote troubles

Being fluent with multiple languages plays a trick on one where a construct exists in many of them, but is worded differently.

Now with pattern

 Looks like SQL Server grew a RegExp engine. Time to revisit the JSON schema validator.