Showing results for August 2012 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

Benjamin Smedberg wants to know how to customize the icon used in the Taskbar for applications that are grouped, when the application is a runtime for multiple applications. (This is the other scenario I hinted at last time.) Actually, customizing the icon is only part of what you want to happen when your application is a runtime. In that case...

I ran into one of my colleagues at the coffee stand and asked him how things were going. He said that Wednesday was his wife's birthday, and he asked her if she wanted to do anything special. "Let's catch a baseball game," she suggested. So off they went to watch a baseball game. Turns out they chose a good game to watch: Seattle Mariners pitcher...

A customer wanted to prevent multiple copies of their program from being grouped on the taskbar. They didn't give an explanation why, but let's assume that they are doing this for honorable purposes rather than as a way to annoy the user. For example, maybe their program is really multiple applications bundled inside a single EXE file for convenie...

We interrupt this program for a word from Microsoft Press. A few months ago, I noted that Charles Petzold is coming back with another edition of Programming Windows, and you could have gotten in on the ground floor and ordered your copy for only $10 which included access to all prerelease versions. Well, the book has reached Release Preview, wh...

Last time, we looked at the evolution of the control panel settings which control the language groups for which Windows will install fonts, code page information, and other support collateral. This was in the context of a customer who was trying to migrate from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, and the customer wanted to convert their workflow to t...

In 2011, a customer had a question about migrating from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. (That's right, this customer was still using Windows 2000 in the year 2011.) Specifically, they noted that in Windows 2000, they can select multiple languages in the "Language settings for the system" portion of the Regional Options control panel...

A customer reported that even after uninstalling their application, the notification icon entry remains in the Notification Area Icons control panel. Yup, that's right. Explorer remembers the icon, even after the underlying program has been uninstalled, because you might have uninstalled it with the intention of immediately reinstalling it, so Exp...

Anon wants to know why I am listed in the credits for the video game Quake under the "Special Thanks" section. "Were you an early tester/debugger?" I've never played a game of Quake in my entire life. I (and most of the rest of the Windows 95 team) played DOOM, but after a while, first-person-shooter games started giving me a headache. By ...

I noted some time ago that real-mode Windows had to do all its memory management without any hardware assistance. And yet, along the way, they managed to implement an LRU-based discard algorithm. Gabe is really interested in how that was done. As we saw a few months ago, inter-segment calls were redirected through a little stub which either ju...

If you type SysFader into your favorite search engine, you'll find lots of hits from people asking, "What is SysFader, and why is it always crashing Internet Explorer?" The exception unknown software exception (0xe06d7363) occurred in the application at location 0x7c812afb. OK Cancel When a...