Showing archive results for 2012

Anon asks, "How do you come up with new shortcut keys and how do you deal with different keyboard layouts? What is the process; is there a company-wide procedure to keep things consistent?" This is several questions (none of them really a suggestion, but I've given up on making the Suggestion Box about suggestions; now it's just the "Ask Raymond a...

Miral asks for the recommended way of passing messages across processes if they require custom marshaling. There is no one recommended way of doing the custom marshaling, although some are hackier than others. Probably the most architecturally beautiful way of doing it is to use a mechanism that does perform automatic marshaling, like COM and MI...

We saw a while ago that the function returns at the slightest provocation. Why can't it return something more meaningful? The short-term answer is that the return value from is both a success code and an error code, and you check whether the value is greater than 32 to see which half you're in. In particular, the error code case is if the va...

On an internal mailing list, somebody asked a question about how to do X with Y, and I replied with a link to an internal wiki that described how to do X with Y (answer: use the Z tool). Somebody else replied, "Time to update that article because the link to the Z tool is broken." Apparently, this person forgot that one of the defining characteri...

Microsoft has a large corporate recycling effort. Every office, every mail room, every kitchenette, every conference room has a recycling bin. The dining facilities earned Green Restaurant Certification, and there is a goal of making the cafeterias a zero-landfill facility by 2012. (Hey, that's this year!) A few years ago, I found one room in m...

Today is the (approximate) 15th anniversary of the Bedlam Incident. To commemorate that event, here's a story of another email incident gone horribly awry. Some time ago, an email message was sent to a large mailing list. It came from somebody in the IT department and said roughly, "This is a mail sent on behalf of Person X to check if your ...

It becomes synchronous, sort of.

Back in August 2007, I promised to post a program the following day but it appears that I never did. Oops. I discovered this as I went through my "things to blog about" pile and figured better late than never. Though five years late is pretty bad. Here's a program which fills a combo box with some strings. Run this program and start typing: "...

A customer asked, "Does NTFS support files with a null string as the name?" No, NTFS does not support files with no name. None of the commonly-used Windows file systems do. Files must have a name. But what a strange question that is. The customer was kind enough to explain why they cared. "We have a zip file that the Compressed Folders (Zip folde...

My colleague KC Lemson tipped me off to a sign hanging next to a popcorn machine in one of the kitchens: A friend of mine happened to have a chat with a fire fighter who used to be assigned to the fire station nearest to Microsoft main campus. According to him, the top three reasons for being called to a Microsoft building are (in no particular ...