Showing results for March 2005 - The Old New Thing

Mar 31, 2005
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Neuroscience in the service of basketball fans

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Nick Shulz's Transition Game pointed out Slate's experiment in using neuroscience to distract opposing foul shooters. I thought this worth mentioning now that it seems that the entire country has been swept up in NCAA basketball fever...

Non-Computer
Mar 31, 2005
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The dialog manager, part 3: Creating the controls

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

This is actually a lot less work than creating the frame, believe it or not. For each control in the template, the corresponding child window is created. The control's sizes and position is specified in the template in DLUs, so of course they need to be converted to pixels. The class name and caption also come from the template. There are ...

Code
Mar 30, 2005
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The dialog manager, part 2: Creating the frame window

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The dialog template describes what the dialog box should look like, so the dialog manager walks the template and follows the instructions therein. It's pretty straightforward; there isn't much room for decision-making. You just do what the template says. For simplicity, I'm going to assume that the dialog template is an extended dialog template...

Code
Mar 29, 2005
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Adventures in product testing: Candles that catch fire

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Not to be outdone by frying pans that explode when you use them for frying, Nature's Finest Candles has issued a product recall [pdf] because the candles catch fire when you light them. This is not to be confused with birthday candles that catch fire and explode...

Non-Computer
Mar 29, 2005
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The dialog manager, part 1: Warm-ups

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

I think a lot of confusion about the dialog manager stems from not really understanding how it works. It's really not that bad. I'll start by describing how dialog boxes are created over the next few articles, then move on to the dialog message loop, and wrap up with some topics regarding navigation. There will be nine parts in all. The first ...

Code
Mar 28, 2005
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The CEO-to-English Phrase Book, a continuing series from Slate

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

I'm an economics geek, so of course I'm a fan of Slate's Moneybox column as well as The Dismal Science and most of all, Steven Landsburg's gleefully provocative Everyday Economics. I'm also a language geek, so I've been quite enjoying the occasional Moneybox articles which decode CEO speak into plain English titled The CEO-English Phrase Book, ...

Non-Computer
Mar 28, 2005
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When a program asks you a question and then gets upset if you answer it

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

JeffDav's story of a program that didn't like it when he told it where to install reminded me of another program that we dealt with during Windows 95 development. This was a big-name program developed by one of the biggest-of-the-big name software companies. Let's give this program the imaginary name "LitWare". Its setup program asked you ...

History
Mar 25, 2005
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The invisible price reduction

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Swedish discount warehouse chain Coop Forum is running an advertising campaign claiming "New Lower Prices!", but how can you tell? Apparently you're not supposed to (shocking!) compare current prices against what they were before the ad campaign. Raymond's bad translation follows. Coops "new" price reduction not new A major new price ...

Non-Computer
Mar 25, 2005
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If you disable drag/drop on the Start menu, you also disable right-click

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

This is one of those poorly-worded options. In the Start menu configuration dialog, you can choose to uncheck "Enable dragging and dropping". This setting disables drag/drop but also disables right-click context menus. The connection between the two is explained in the Group Policy Editor, but is unfortunately oversimplified in the general-public ...

Tips/Support
Mar 24, 2005
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Pointers to virtual functions with adjustors

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

As a mental exercise, let's combine two mind-numbing facts about pointers to member functions, namely that all pointers to virtual functions look the same and that pointers to member functions are very strange animals. The result may make your head explode. Consider: Here, the variable consists of a code pointer and an adjustor. The code ...

Code