May 2011 | The Old New Thing

My evil essence revealed

Raymond ChenMay 31, 2011May 31, 201105/31/11

I found it amusing that somebody considered the fact that Microsoft employees can read my queued-up blog entries before the articles are published to be further evidence of Microsoft's evil essence as a monopoly. Just for the record, this is not evidence of Microsoft's evil essence as a monopoly. Rather, it's evidence of Raymond's evil esse

Just for fun: Sample user names in Windows 7

Raymond ChenMay 30, 2011May 30, 201105/30/11

There are a few places in Windows where you are asked to enter your name in order to set up an account. Just for fun, I went through all the localized versions I could find and extracted the sample names. Some locales did not get around to translating all the strings. If the string was left untranslated (which can happen for LIPs), then I lef

Why are custom properties created on Windows 2000 lost when I view the file from newer versions of Windows?

Raymond ChenMay 27, 2011May 27, 201105/27/11

In Windows 2000, Explorer let you add properties like Summary and Author to nearly any file type. But when you view the files from a machine running Windows XP or later, those properties are lost. Where did they go? Most file types do not have extensibility points for adding metadata. For example, every byte of a plain text files is

How do IsThemeActive, IsAppThemed, and IsCompositionActive differ?

Raymond ChenMay 26, 2011May 26, 201105/26/11

There are three functions which test very similar things, and sometimes applications pick the wrong one. Here's the rundown: Note that these functions do not answer the question "Is the application using the visual-styles-enabled version of the common controls library?" That question is harder to answer because the decision to use the visua

WinMain is just the conventional name for the Win32 process entry point

Raymond ChenMay 25, 2011May 25, 201105/25/11

WinMain is the conventional name for the user-provided entry point in a Win32 program. Just like in 16-bit Windows, where the complicated entry point requirements were converted by language-provided startup code into a call to the the user's WinMain function, the language startup code for 32-bit programs also does the work of converting the

Microspeak: PowerPoint Karaoke and the eye chart

Raymond ChenMay 24, 2011May 24, 201105/24/11

The game PowerPoint-Karaoke was invented in 2006 by Zentrale Ingelligenz Agentur. In this game, contestants are called upon to give a PowerPoint presentation based on a slide deck they have never seen. (The German spelling uses a hyphen between the two words. When "translated" into English, the hyphen is often omitted.) At Microsoft, the ter

If it's possible to do something, then it's possible to do something WRONG

Raymond ChenMay 23, 2011May 23, 201105/23/11

Once you make it possible to do something, you have to accept that you also made it possible to do something wrong. When the window manager was originally designed, it made it possible for programs to override many standard behaviors. They could handle the WM_NCHITTEST message so a window can be dragged by grabbing any part of th

One engineer's interpretation of the Segway as a hybrid vehicle

Raymond ChenMay 20, 2011May 20, 201105/20/11

In a discussion of commuting options (in which I was primarily an observer), the following exchange took place: A: I would rather get kicked in the shins every morning than bike up the massive hill that sits between my apartment and main campus. B: Have you tried an electric bike? C: If you're going to eliminate pedaling, then you may as w

BeginBufferedPaint: It's not just for buffered painting any more

Raymond ChenMay 20, 2011May 20, 201105/20/11

I covered the BeginBufferedPaint function in my 2008 PDC presentation, but one thing I didn't mention is that the buffered paint functions are very handy even if you have no intention of painting. Since the buffered paint functions maintain a cache (provided that you remembed to call BufferedPaintInit), you can use BeginBuff

Why is my program terminating with exit code 3?

Raymond ChenMay 19, 2011May 19, 201105/19/11

There is no standard for process exit codes. You can pass anything you want to ExitProcess, and that's what GetExitCodeProcess will give back. The kernel does no interpretation of the value. If youw want code 42 to mean "Something infinitely improbable has occurred" then more power to you. There is a convention, however,

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