Showing results for March 2010 - Page 3 of 4 - The Old New Thing

It's a long, sad story.

The customer is the victim, not the program.

At an informal gathering, my colleagues and I started talking about our experiences being interviewed at Microsoft. One of the people there remembered how one of the pieces of feedback on the interview lo these many years ago was that although my colleague was certainly smart enough and hardworking enough, there seemed to be insufficient enthusiasm...

Willy-Peter Schaub was puzzled by a sign reminding drivers that the fine for obstructing an intersection is $101 and wonders what the extra $1 is for. The laws of the State of Washington defer the monetary value of traffic fines to the Infraction Rules for Courts of Limited Jurisdiction (more commonly known as the IRLJ), specifically section 6....

Dialog boxes and property sheets are similar in that most of the time, you use them modally. You call or , and the function doesn't return until the user closes the dialog box or property sheet. But you can also use dialog boxes and property sheets modelessly, using or by including the flag when you call . One of the more common problems people...

Now let me get this straight. The Oscars honor, among other things, the best actors in Hollywood. These are people who have devoted their professional careers to reciting dialog in front of a camera and making it look spontaneous and natural. But for some reason, put them on stage at the Oscars, and instead of reciting dialog spontaneously and na...

kip asks why double-right-click isn't a shortcut for Properties. Recall the logical consequences of the way Windows converts single-clicks into double-clicks. The double-click action is an extension of the single-click action. In the case of context menus, the proposed double-right-click action is not an extension of the single-right-click, bec...

When friends of mine were expecting their first child, the wife frequently received comments like "That's okay. You're eating for two now." The husband had a response ready: "If she's eating for two, I'm drinking for three!"

There are functions like , , , and for detecting that a floating point value is one of the special values like NaN, but how do you actually generate one of these values? You can access these values from the template. Wait, where's negative infinity? The compiler folks provided these handy little definitions for when you need to generate ...

March fourth is not just a pun on march forth, but it's also National Grammar Day, sponsored by the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar.