October 2003 | The Old New Thing

Why highlighting by inverting colors is a bad idea

Raymond ChenOctober 31, 2003Oct 31, 200310/31/03

Often people will say, "Oh, we can highlight by inverting the color." This may have worked great on two-color black-and-white displays, but in the world of 32-bit color this no longer is effective. Consider the following picture. See if you can guess which one is inverted.

I thought you said people don't know how to read analog clocks

Raymond ChenOctober 30, 2003Oct 30, 200310/30/03

I had mentioned in passing in a comment on 10/10/2003 10:07PM that one of the reasons the clock on the taskbar isn't analog is that some disturbingly high percentage of people (30%? 40%? I forget exactly) do not know how to read an analog clock. Yet there is is in the Longhorn sidebar. W

Drawing an active-looking caption even when not active

Raymond ChenOctober 29, 2003Oct 29, 200310/29/03

"Why would somebody ever want to do that?" you might ask. Well, this is a common appearance for floating toolbars. (But aside from that case, I can't think of any other valid reason to draw a window as active even though it isn't.) Fortunately this is easy to do. Just add this line to the WndProc

When vendors insult themselves

Raymond ChenOctober 28, 2003Oct 28, 200310/28/03

During Windows 95, when we were building the Plug and Play infrastructure, we got an angry letter from a hardware vendor (who shall remain nameless) complaining that we intentionally misspelled their company name in our INF files in a manner that made their company name similar to an insulting word.

Getting a custom right-click menu for the caption icon

Raymond ChenOctober 27, 2003Oct 27, 200310/27/03

Explorer does it. Now you can too. It's a simple matter of detecting a context menu on the caption icon and displaying a custom context menu. Here are the simple changes to our scratch program to display a rather pointless one-item menu. When we receive a WM_CONTEXTMENU mes

Being the Nobel Peace Prize

Raymond ChenOctober 26, 2003Oct 26, 200310/26/03

For Hallowe'en this year, I'm going to be the Nobel Peace Prize. (I like being things that people would never even think of as a possible Hallowe'en costume. Last year, I was an inter-office envelope. People addressed me from place to place.) I chose the Nobel Peace Prize in part because

Kinder Überraschungen

Raymond ChenOctober 25, 2003Oct 25, 200310/25/03

Laura John entertains her colleagues with Kinder Surprise eggs. I love these things. I understand that Kinder Surprise eggs are illegal in the US for two reasons. Whenever I go to Germany I smuggle some Kinder Überraschungen into the States. (Yes,

Why Daylight Savings Time is nonintuitive

Raymond ChenOctober 24, 2003Oct 24, 200310/24/03

Welcome Knowledge Base article 932955 readers! Remember, the information on this Web site is not official Microsoft documentation. Daylight Savings Time ends this weekend in most of North America and Europe, so it seems a good time to discuss the whole problem of Daylight Savings Time and timestamps. A common complai

Writing a sort comparison function

Raymond ChenOctober 23, 2003Oct 23, 200310/23/03

When you are writing a sort comparison function (say, to be passed to ListView_SortItems or *gasp* to be used as an IComparer), your comparison function needs to follow these rules: Reflexivity: Compare(a, a) = 0. Anti-Symmetry: Compare(a, b) has the opposite sign of Compare(b, a), where 0 is considered to be its own opposite. Transitivity:

What's the deal with those reserved filenames like NUL and CON?

Raymond ChenOctober 22, 2003Oct 22, 200310/22/03

Set the wayback machine to DOS 1.0. DOS 1.0 didn't support subdirectories, lowercase, or filenames longer than 8.3. When you ran the assembler (or compiler if you were really fancy) the conversation went something like this: A>asm foo the ".asm" exte

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