The Old New Thing

June 2004 - Page 4 of 5 - The Old New Thing

A hidden performance cost of regional windows

June 11, 2004 Jun 11, 2004 06/11/04
Raymond Chen
Regional windows are neat, but they come at a cost. Most of the cost you can see directly. For example, constantly changing the region clearly generates a cost since you have to sit there and generate new regions all the time. One question that came up on an internal performance alias highlights one of the hidden costs of regional windows: ...

Speeding up adding items to a combobox or listbox

June 10, 2004 Jun 10, 2004 06/10/04
Raymond Chen
Just a little tip: If you're going to be adding a lot of items to a listbox or combobox, there are a few little things you can do to improve the performance significantly. (Note: The improvements work only if you have a lot of items, like hundreds. Of course, the usability of a listbox with a hundred items is questionable, but I'm assuming ...

What are these directories called 0409 and 1033?

June 9, 2004 Jun 9, 2004 06/9/04
Raymond Chen
A reader asked, I was wondering why it's common for some Microsoft products to have a directory called "1033" within it's program directory installation location? What does it mean? This reader was probably from the United States, because 1033 is the locale identifier for "English (United States)", whose hexadecimal value is 0x0409...

Let there be a grand clubhouse feast!

June 8, 2004 Jun 8, 2004 06/8/04
Raymond Chen
Kenny Mayne is one of the regular anchors for ESPN SportsCenter and for some reason I find this particular home run call hilarious: I am king of the diamond! Let there be a grand clubhouse feast! [WAV] Bring me the finest meats and cheeses throughout the land! — From The SportsCenter Altar multimedia download center. Here...

When can a thread receive window messages?

June 8, 2004 Jun 8, 2004 06/8/04
Raymond Chen
Everybody who has messed with window messaging knows that GetMessage and PeekMessage retrieve queued messages, which are dispatched to windows via DispatchMessage. Most people also know that GetMessage and PeekMessage will also dispatch nonqueued messages. (All pending nonqueued messages are dispatched, then the first queued message is ...

The suburbs make you fat, more researchers conclude

June 7, 2004 Jun 7, 2004 06/7/04
Raymond Chen
Two legs good - four wheels bad. (With apologies to George Orwell.) Researchers link increase car use with obesity. Each hour spent in a car was associated with a 6 percent increase in the likelihood of obesity and each half-mile walked per day reduced those odds by nearly 5 percent, the researchers found. A study last ...

Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

June 4, 2004 Jun 4, 2004 06/4/04
Raymond Chen
During the run-up to Windows XP Service Pack 2 Beta in December of last year, there was a list of five bugs that the release management team decided were so critical that they were going to slip the beta until those bugs got fixed. The third bug on the list: Deer Hunter 4 won't run. Deer Hunter has the power to stop a beta...