The Old New Thing

August 2011 - Page 3 of 3 - The Old New Thing

Menu item states are not reliable until they are shown because they aren't needed until then

August 5, 2011 Aug 5, 2011 08/5/11
Raymond Chen
A question arrived from a customer (with the rather unhelpful subject line Question for Microsoft) wondering why, when they call and then ask for the states of the various menu items like , the menu item states don't reflect reality. The menu item states don't synchronize with reality until the user actually opens the system menu. There is ...

Why doesn't b match word boundaries correctly?

August 4, 2011 Aug 4, 2011 08/4/11
Raymond Chen
A colleague of mine was having trouble getting the metacharacter in a regular expression to work. Of course, when somebody asks a question like that, you first have to establish what their definition of "work" is. Fortunately, he provided some examples: "The last two entries are just sanity checks to make sure I didn't make some stupid ...

An even easier way to get Windows Media Player to single-step a video

August 2, 2011 Aug 2, 2011 08/2/11
Raymond Chen
Since my original article explaining how to get Windows Media Player to single-step a video, I've learned that there's an even easier way. Backward-stepping is dependent upon the codec; some of them will go backward to the previous keyframe. The person who tipped me off to this feature: The developer who implemented it. Remember: Sharing...

Why can you set each monitor to a different color depth?

August 1, 2011 Aug 1, 2011 08/1/11
Raymond Chen
Random832 seemed horrified by the fact that it is possible to run multiple monitors, with different color formats on each monitor. "Seriously, why does it let you do that?" Well, of course you can do that. Why shouldn't it let you do that? When multiple monitors were introduced to Windows, video hardware was nowhere near as advanced as it is...