The Old New Thing

February 2012 - The Old New Thing

What was the nature of the feedback that resulted in the change to the highlighting model for Explorer navigation pane?

February 29, 2012 Feb 29, 2012 02/29/12
Raymond Chen
Gabe wanted to know the nature of the feedback that resulted in the change to Explorer navigation pane. Historically, Explorer had a navigation pane that contained a folder tree, and the navigation pane could be toggled on and off. From observations and usability studies, we observed that users in general found this toggling burdensome. ...

Why was HDS_FILTERBAR added to the common controls if nobody uses it?

February 27, 2012 Feb 27, 2012 02/27/12
Raymond Chen
Mike Dunn was curious about the intended purpose of . The style adds a row below the header control consisting of an edit control and a funnel icon. The funnel icon presumably represents a coffee filter, because after all, everybody in the world drinks coffee as much as people in Seattle. (Developers think they're so clever.) Mike points ...

Why does Windows keep showing the old indirect strings even after I update the binary?

February 24, 2012 Feb 24, 2012 02/24/12
Raymond Chen
If your application uses indirect localized string resources, and you update the application, you may find that Windows keeps using the old string from the previous version of the application. For example, suppose that you set the localized name for a shortcut to , and in version 1 of your program, you have For version 2, your ...

What does the minus sign in indirect localized string resources mean?

February 23, 2012 Feb 23, 2012 02/23/12
Raymond Chen
The syntax for indirect localized string resources is filenamestringId, optionally followed by a semicolon and a comment. A customer wanted to know what the minus signs stands for. The minus sign doesn't "stand for" anything. It's just part of the syntax. It's like asking what the semicolon at the end of a C statement stands for. It doesn't ...

Instead of creating something and then trying to hide it, simply don't create it in the first place

February 22, 2012 Feb 22, 2012 02/22/12
Raymond Chen
A customer had a question, which was sort of I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature in reverse. A customer is asking if there is a way to programmatically control the icons in the notification area. Specifically, they want the setting for their notification icon to be "Only show notifications" rather than "Show icon and ...
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Why don't music files show up in my Recent Items list?

February 21, 2012 Feb 21, 2012 02/21/12
Raymond Chen
If you double-click a music file, it doesn't show up in your Recent Items list. What's so special about music files? The technical reason is that the file types are registered with the flag, which means that they don't show up in the Recent Items list (formerly known as Recent Documents), and they don't show up in the Recent or Frequent ...

What's the difference between Text Document, Text Document – MS-DOS Format, and Unicode Text Document?

February 20, 2012 Feb 20, 2012 02/20/12
Raymond Chen
Alasdair King asks why Wordpad has three formats, Text Document, Text Document - MS-DOS Format, and Unicode Text Document. "Isn't at least one redundant?" Recall that in Windows, three code pages have special status. Three text file formats. Three encodings. Hm... I wonder... As you might have guessed by now, the three text file ...
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How do I find out which process has a file open?

February 17, 2012 Feb 17, 2012 02/17/12
Raymond Chen
Classically, there was no way to find out which process has a file open. A file object has a reference count, and when the reference count drops to zero, the file is closed. But there's nobody keeping track of which processes own how many references. (And that's ignoring the case that the reference is not coming from a process in the first ...
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Why does the DrawIcon function draw at the default icon size?

February 16, 2012 Feb 16, 2012 02/16/12
Raymond Chen
Miral wondered why the function draws at the default icon size instead of respecting the actual icon size. After all, if you loaded a nonstandard-sized icon via , then presumably you want to use that nonstandard size. The question is one of those types of questions that fails to understand history, like asking why NASA didn't send the space...