The Old New Thing

April 2006 - The Old New Thing

What does CS_SAVEBITS do?

April 28, 2006 Apr 28, 2006 04/28/06
Raymond Chen
If you specify the class style, then the window manager will try to save the bits covered by the window. But the real question is why, because that is your guide to using this power only for good, not for evil. When a window whose class specifies the class style is displayed, the window manager takes a snapshot of the pixels on the screen ...

A new scripting language doesn't solve everything

April 27, 2006 Apr 27, 2006 04/27/06
Raymond Chen
Yes, there are plenty of scripting languages that are much better than boring old batch. Batch files were definitely a huge improvement over back in 1981, but they've been showing their age for quite some time. The advanced age of boring old batch, on the other hand, means that you have millions of batch files out there that you had better ...

No good deed goes unpunished: Bug assignment

April 26, 2006 Apr 26, 2006 04/26/06
Raymond Chen
Sometimes you're better off keeping your fool mouth shut. The other day I got a piece of email requesting that I look at a crashed system because the tester believed it was another instance of bug 12345. While that may very well have been the case, bug 12345 was a kernel pool corruption bug in the object manager, something of which ...

Correctly spell xerophthalmia and the crowd goes wild

April 25, 2006 Apr 25, 2006 04/25/06
Raymond Chen
One of the things I did in San Francisco was attend a performance of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. I went into the show with some trepidation, fearing that it would recall painful memories from my own career on the spelling bee circuit as a middle-schooler. Fortunately, my experience as a spelling bee participant only served to...

No, really, you need to pass all unhandled messages to DefWindowProc

April 25, 2006 Apr 25, 2006 04/25/06
Raymond Chen
Earlier I had discussed that you have to return the special value if you want to deny a device removal query because too many programs thought that they had covered "all" the Windows messages and just returned zero for the others. Since then, there have been lots of other window messages added to the system, many of which contain nontrivial ...

Ich habe meinen Computer zu Deutsch gewechselt

April 24, 2006 Apr 24, 2006 04/24/06
Raymond Chen
This weekend, I changed my computer's user interface language from Swedish (where it had been since November 2003) to German. Germany is the country I'm most likely to vacation to next, and I figured I should start pseudo-immersing myself. Of course, all it really means is that I'm going to be learning a lot of computer-related German words ...

Troubleshooting tips are not formal product documentation

April 24, 2006 Apr 24, 2006 04/24/06
Raymond Chen
The Microsoft Knowledge Base is filled with product support tips, but be careful to understand the scope of those tips. Generally speaking, information provided in the Knowledge Base exists for troubleshooting purposes, not for program design. That's why each article lists specifically which operating system it applies to: There is no ...

Then again, it might not be overclocking after all

April 21, 2006 Apr 21, 2006 04/21/06
Raymond Chen
While it's true that there's an awful lot of overclocking out there, it's also true that not everything that looks like overclocking actually is. Last Thanksgiving, I helped one of my relatives upgrade their computer by scavenging parts from another unused computer (installing more memory and replacing a broken CD drive). When I took the ...

More about the house in front of Microsoft's RedWest campus

April 20, 2006 Apr 20, 2006 04/20/06
Raymond Chen
After I mentioned that house in front of Microsoft's RedWest campus, I received an e-mail message from Mike Daly which corrects some of my mistakes and provides additional details: Actually, there were two houses in the strip in front of RedWest. The one you show has not been moved. The other ended up on blocks and parked opposite the ...