January 2013 | Page 2 of 3 | The Old New Thing

Microspeak: pivot

Raymond Chen January 22, 2013 Jan 22, 2013 01/22/13

A great word to use at Microsoft to make it sound like you're one of the cool insiders is pivot. Mostly because the meaning of the word varies from place to place, so you can use it to mean whatever you like while still sounding hip and jargony. In Windows Phone, the term pivot is a technical term which refers to a type of control that lets...

The 2013/2014 Seattle Symphony subscription season at a glance

Raymond Chen January 21, 2013 Jan 21, 2013 01/21/13

For many years, I've put together a little pocket guide to the Seattle Symphony subscription season for my symphony friends to help them decide which ticket package they want. In the years that have passed since I started doing this, nearly all of the members of the group have started families, and we tried things like splitting ...

The changing name of the Microsoft event held in conjunction with Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Raymond Chen January 21, 2013 Jan 21, 2013 01/21/13

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a federal holiday in the United States honoring the civil rights leader and formally serving as a day to reflect on the principles of racial equality and nonviolent social change and more generally to honor Dr. King's legacy through service. At Microsoft, the day has been recognized with an event ...

What is this rogue version 1.0 of the HTML clipboard format?

Raymond Chen January 18, 2013 Jan 18, 2013 01/18/13

At least as of the time this article was originally written, the HTML clipboard format is officially at version 0.9. A customer observed that sometimes they received HTML clipboard data that marked itself as version 1.0 and wanted to know where they could find documentation on that version. As far as I can tell, there is no official ...

A brief history of the GetEnvironmentStrings functions

Raymond Chen January 17, 2013 Jan 17, 2013 01/17/13

The GetEnvironmentStrings function has a long and troubled history. The first bit of confusion is that the day it was introduced in Windows NT 3.1, it was exported funny. The UNICODE version was exported under the name GetEnvironmentStringsW, but the ANSI version was exported under the name GetEnvironment...

How do I create a TaskDialog with a progress bar but no cancel button?

Raymond Chen January 16, 2013 Jan 16, 2013 01/16/13

A developer from another group within Microsoft wanted to create a TaskDialog with a progress bar, but they couldn't figure out how to get rid of the Cancel button. "Is there a way to remove all the buttons from a Task Dialog?" Um, users hate it when you give them a window that cannot be closed or cancelled. What should the user ...

If there were some sort of award for alternative commuting, we would’ve been eligible

Raymond Chen January 15, 2013 Jan 15, 2013 01/15/13

A few projects ago, I worked on a team whose members came to work by a wide variety of modes. If there were some sort of award for alternative commuting, we would've been eligible. One of the full-time telecommuters was based in Spain, which was handy because he was available to deal with issues that cropped up while everybody in Redmond ...

State law requires you to watch this video of a singing hippo

Raymond Chen January 14, 2013 Jan 14, 2013 01/14/13

I did it briefly a few years ago, but I'm going to make it a regular Monday feature, at least for this year: Blogging my dreams. I dreamed that I was back in my high school English class, and due to some new state law, everybody was required to watch this video of a singing hippo. The hard part was walking four miles to the nearest viewing ...

How can I write a script that finds my top-rated photos?

Raymond Chen January 14, 2013 Jan 14, 2013 01/14/13

I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep it up, but I'm going to see if I can make Monday "Little Programs" day, where I solve simple problems with little programs. Today's little program is a script that goes through your Pictures folder and picks out your top-rated photos. The key step here is extracting the rating, which goes by the name ...

Understanding errors in classical linking: The delay-load catch-22

Raymond Chen January 11, 2013 Jan 11, 2013 01/11/13

Wrapping up our week of understanding the classical model for linking, we'll put together all the little pieces we've learned this week to puzzle out a linker problem: The delay-load catch-22. You do some code cleanup, then rebuild your project, and you get LNK4199: /DELAYLOAD:SHLWAPI ignored; no imports found from SHLWAPI What does ...

The Old New Thing