The Old New Thing

August 2010 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

Why does the primary monitor have (0,0) as its upper left coordinate?

August 20, 2010 Aug 20, 2010 08/20/10
Raymond Chen
By definition, the primary monitor is the monitor that has (0,0) as its upper left corner. Why can't the primary monitor be positioned somewhere else? Well, sure you could do that, but then you'd have to invent a new name for the monitor whose upper left corner is at (0,0), and then you're back where you started. In other words, it's just a ...

I challenge you to come up with an even lamer physics pun

August 19, 2010 Aug 19, 2010 08/19/10
Raymond Chen
The other day, I was in the office kitchenette, and two of my colleagues both named Paul happened to be there getting coffee. I quipped, "Oh no, is this legal? I think it's a violation of the Paul Exclusion Principle." It was a horrible physics pun, perhaps one of the worst I've made in a long time. My challenge to you is to come up with an ...

Microspeak: The funnel

August 18, 2010 Aug 18, 2010 08/18/10
Raymond Chen
In the Customer Service and Support part of Microsoft, you will often see the term funnel. Here are some citations: Effectively and efficiently solve issues by driving levers across the entire funnel. Putting the Fun in Funnel. Strengthening the front of the funnel. The funnel is a way of viewing customer support engagements. For some ...

What was that story about the WinHelp pen-writing-in-book animation?

August 17, 2010 Aug 17, 2010 08/17/10
Raymond Chen
The first time you open a WinHelp file, you get this pen-writing-in-book animation while WinHelp does um something which it passes off as preparing Help file for first use or something similarly vague. I remember a conversation about that animation. The Windows shell team suggested to the author of WinHelp that the program use the shell ...

What happened to WinHelp?

August 16, 2010 Aug 16, 2010 08/16/10
Raymond Chen
Commenter winhelp (probably not his/her real name) wonders what happened to WinHelp.exe. I don't know, but it turns out the answer was already known to the Internet. At the time the question was posted, the answer was already in the Wikipedia entry for Windows Help—it even had a citation! The question does highlight another one of ...

When do I need to use GC.KeepAlive?

August 13, 2010 Aug 13, 2010 08/13/10
Raymond Chen
Finalization is the crazy wildcard in garbage collection. It operates "behind the GC", running after the GC has declared an object dead. Think about it: Finalizers run on objects that have no active references. How can be a reference to an object that has no references? That's just crazy-talk! Finalizers are a Ouija board, permitting dead ...

How can I find all objects of a particular type?

August 12, 2010 Aug 12, 2010 08/12/10
Raymond Chen
More than one customer has asked a question like this: I'm looking for a way to search for all instances of a particular type at runtime. My goal is to invoke a particular method on each of those instances. Note that I did not create these object myself or have any other access to them. Is this possible? Imagine what the world would be ...

How do I get the reference count of a CLR object?

August 11, 2010 Aug 11, 2010 08/11/10
Raymond Chen
A customer asked the rather enigmatic question (with no context): Is there a way to get the reference count of an object in .Net? Thanks, Bob Smith Senior Developer Contoso The CLR does not maintain reference counts, so there is no reference count to "get". The garbage collector only cares about whether an object has zero references ...