The Old New Thing

January 2012 - Page 4 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Why don't ZIP files have the FILE_ATTRIBUTE_COMPRESSED attribute?

January 3, 2012 Jan 3, 2012 01/3/12
Raymond Chen
A customer reported that when they called on a ZIP file, the attribute was not returned. But ZIP files are compressed. Why isn't the attribute being set? Because tells you whether the file was compressed by the file system. It is not a flag which describes the semantics of the bytes stored in the file. After all, the file system doesn't ...

Why wasn't the Windows 95 shell prototyped on Windows NT?

January 2, 2012 Jan 2, 2012 01/2/12
Raymond Chen
Carlos wonders why the Windows 95 shell was prototyped as 16-bit code running on the still-under-development 32-bit kernel, USER, and GDI as opposed to being prototyped as fully 32-bit code on Windows NT. There were a number of reasons, some good, some bad. One reason was that the Windows 95 shell was being developed by the Windows&...