The Old New Thing

August 2008 - Page 4 of 4 - The Old New Thing

For that, you’ll have to call security

August 7, 2008 Aug 7, 2008 08/7/08
Raymond Chen
Yahoo! is notorious for bad parking, but they're not the only ones. Microsoft has recurring parking problems as well, caused by office space shortages that force employees to be crammed into offices at double or even triple the intended density. Since parking lots are sized based on the expected number of cars, overstuffing a building with ...

The caret serves as the continuation character for batch files

August 6, 2008 Aug 6, 2008 08/6/08
Raymond Chen
We saw earlier that the caret is the escape character for the batch language. In a comment to that article, KJK::Hyperion mentioned that the caret serves as the line continuation character. A useful tip if you still find yourself messing with batch files. Mark Yocum elaborates on this point a bit more...

What’s with this MSH_MOUSEWHEEL message?

August 6, 2008 Aug 6, 2008 08/6/08
Raymond Chen
The hardware folks had this mouse wheel thing they were making, and they needed a way to get applications to support the mouse. Now, one way of doing this was to say, "Well, we'll start selling this wheel mouse, but no applications can use it until the next version of Windows is released, one that supports the wheel." Of course, that would ...

Microspeak: The long pole

August 5, 2008 Aug 5, 2008 08/5/08
Raymond Chen
The long pole is the part of the project that is on the critical path due to its length. For example, if you have a project that consists of three independent sub-projects, then the sub-project with the longest completion date is the long pole. The etymology of this term is simultaneously obvious yet hard to pin down. Intuitively, the long ...

Why, when you sort by name, doesn’t it actually sort by name?

August 4, 2008 Aug 4, 2008 08/4/08
Raymond Chen
When you right-click on the desktop or in an Explorer window and select "Sort by... Name", why doesn't it actually sort by name? Because "Sort according to the default sort order for the column whose title is... Name" is too long. The default sort order for the first column (whose name is "Name") is to sort by name, mostly. The actual ...

I warned you: The dangers of attaching input queues

August 1, 2008 Aug 1, 2008 08/1/08
Raymond Chen
Some people didn't take to heart my cautions on the subject of attached input queues, item number five on the list of five things every Win32 programmer should know. And then they find that their application stops responding. // Code in italics is wrong void TryToStealFocus(HWND hwnd) { // First try plain SetForegroundWindow ...