Showing results for November 2008 - The Old New Thing

The Hiram M. Chittenden Locks (more commonly known as the Ballard Locks) are a common attraction in Seattle. But if you pay a visit for the next week, you'll find that the large set of locks will be empty. And not just empty of boats. Empty of water. The chamber has been emptied of water for annual maintenance, and if you stop by, you can take p...

Here's a question from a customer: I made some changes related to my shell extension [details omitted], but the changes don't show up in the Explorer window when I refresh it. Any suggestions on how to solve this problem? When we asked how they were refreshing the Explorer window, we were expecting something like pressing F5 or calling with ,...

Yes, maybe you're one of those crazy people who camps out in front of a store so you can be the first person in line to get this year's hot toy, or so you can snag one of the doorbuster deals. But be judicious in your rush, because the police are out there too, and they're shopping for something else.

Last year, I sent some email to the people who run our team's check-in validation tool asking how I could add a new rule to the validation tests. One of the members wrote back, "You do it just like this guy," and sent me a reference to another check-in that added a validation rule. That other check-in was made by me. But wait, it gets better. ...

How many of them are there?

Back in the late 1990's one of my colleagues (who is now in Office Labs—check it out, they've got some pretty cool stuff) filed an expense report for a hair dryer, and it was accepted. But what valid business purpose would there be for a tester to buy a hair dryer? At the time, my colleague worked as a tester for Windows power management. ...

When you're walking around a city, you usually forget to look up. It takes a landmark building to prompt you to admire anything above the ground floor. For those in the Seattle area, the Seattle Times included a brief walking tour of Seattle architecture. The article doesn't mention one of my favorites: The roll-on deodorant building on the co...

Commenter Anonymous asked why navigating to a drive with no media displays a dialog instead of showing the error message in the view. This is an unfortunate consequence of Explorer's browser/view model. The shell browser binds to the and asks for the view by calling . The view window calls to figure out what to show in the view—and here ...

Rachmaninov's Prelude in C# minor, Op. 3, No. 2, performed as it is written, by classical music comedy duo Igudesman & Joo. I tried to learn that piece once. I didn't last long.

The phenomenon I call priority inflation has spread to product planning documents as well. Back in the old days, there were three priority levels: Over the past few years, I've seen a shift in the labelling of priorities in planning documents. A new priority has been introduced: Priority Zero. Nobody has explained to me what Priority 0 m...