The Old New Thing

July 2004 - Page 3 of 5 - The Old New Thing

Watch out for those sample URLs

July 13, 2004 Jul 13, 2004 07/13/04
Raymond Chen
When writing documentation, one often has need to come up with a sample URL to illustrate some point or other. When you do, make sure the sample URL is under your control. I remember a Windows beta that used the sample URL http://www.xxxxx.com/ in a dialog box. You can imagine where that actually goes. This web site uses www....

Positioned vs. non-positioned listview views

July 12, 2004 Jul 12, 2004 07/12/04
Raymond Chen
Occasionally, I'll see a question that betrays a lack of understanding of difference between the positioned and non-positioned listview views. The question usually goes along the lines of "I inserted an item with LVM_INSERTITEM but it went to the end of the list instead of in the location I inserted it." To understand what is going on, ...

Welcoming a new era in Swiss army knives

July 12, 2004 Jul 12, 2004 07/12/04
Raymond Chen
Victorinox, the company authorized to make so-called Swiss Army merchandise, has run into a bit of a problem: Is there anything else you could possibly think of putting on a pocketknife for an outdoorsman? And even if you did, there's no room for it. The pocketknife has already reached the point where it's too unwieldy to carry ...

How does Add/Remove Programs get the size and other information?

July 9, 2004 Jul 9, 2004 07/9/04
Raymond Chen
If the program doesn't provide this information itself, Add/Remove Programs is forced to guess. The problem is that there is no "obvious" way to map an entry in the Add/Remove Programs list to an actual program. Each entry in the list, for those who care about such things, comes from the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\...

Why does icon text get a solid background if drop shadows are disabled?

July 8, 2004 Jul 8, 2004 07/8/04
Raymond Chen
A commenter asks why icon label have "those ugly color boxes" when there is a background image. The answer: Because the alternative would be worse. Imagine if there were no solid background between the text and the background image. You would end up with text against an unpredictable background, which doesn't help readability. Take...

Lighting organic material and sucking it into your lungs

July 8, 2004 Jul 8, 2004 07/8/04
Raymond Chen
Last year, The Philip Morris Companies renamed itself to the warm-and-fuzzy sounding Altria Group. Gotta love the colorful abstract logo they've got. (Psst, editors of the Altria home page: It's "Whom We Fund". "Whom" with an "m".) They claim the name comes from the Latin altus ("high") but that doesn't explain where the "r" comes ...

Obtaining a window’s size and position while it is minimized

July 7, 2004 Jul 7, 2004 07/7/04
Raymond Chen
If you have a minimized window and want to know where it will go when you restore it, the GetWindowPlacement function will tell you. In particular, the tells you where the window would go if it were restored (as opposed to minimized or maximized). One perhaps-non-obvious flag is WPF_RESTORETOMAXIMIZED. This flag indicates that the ...

Differences between managers and programmers, part 2

July 7, 2004 Jul 7, 2004 07/7/04
Raymond Chen
If you are attending a presentation, you can tell whether the person at the lectern is a manager or a programmer by looking at their PowerPoint presentation. If it's black-and-white, all-text, multimedia-free, and rarely has more than ten bullet points on a page, then the presenter is probably a programmer. If it's colorful, with ...