April 2013 | The Old New Thing

The most expensive notepads in Microsoft history

Raymond ChenApril 30, 2013Apr 30, 201304/30/13

Many years ago, I visited the office of a colleague who worked on Internet Explorer in order to work on some problem or other. As we investigated the issue, we took notes on a 5"×7" tear-off notepad which bore the logo Forms³. My colleague then pointed out to me that we were taking notes on the most expensive notepads in Microsoft...

Dentistry in the Brazil-like future

Raymond ChenApril 29, 2013Apr 29, 201304/29/13

I dreamed that I was living in a nursing home in some Brazil-like dystopic future. In this future, people had become so horribly disfigured that they wore flesh-colored suits under their clothes all the time just so they would look good "naked". This vanity extended only to people under the age of around 40. The old people in the home were ...

Getting the display name for a shell property

Raymond ChenApril 29, 2013Apr 29, 201304/29/13

Today's Little Program takes the symbolic name for a shell property and returns a string suitable for display to the end-user, translated into the user's specified display language. #include <windows.h> #include <ole2.h> #include <propsys.h> #include <propkey.h> #include <atlbase.h> #include <atlalloc.h>...

Fake film project tries to create real film to hide fakeness (and fails)

Raymond ChenApril 26, 2013Apr 26, 201304/26/13

In 2010, a group of scam artists pretended that they were making a film, appropriately titled A Landscape of Lies. They did this so that they could claim over £2.7 million in tax credits intended to boost the British film industry. Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs began to suspect something was up when no apparent progress was being ...

Another way to create a process with attributes, maybe worse maybe better

Raymond ChenApril 26, 2013Apr 26, 201304/26/13

Adam Rosenfield noted that "those sure are a lot of hoops you have to jump through to solve this unusual problem" of specifying which handles are inherited by a new process. Well, first of all, what's so wrong with that? You have to jump through a lot of hoops when you are in an unusual situation. But by definition, most people are not in an...

If you’re going to use an interlocked operation to generate a unique value, you need to use it before it’s gone

Raymond ChenApril 25, 2013Apr 25, 201304/25/13

Is the InterlockedIncrement function broken? One person seemed to think so. We're finding that the InterlockedIncrement is producing duplicate values. Are there are any know bugs in InterlockedIncrement? Because of course when something doesn't work, it's because you are the victim of a vast conspiracy. There is a ...

Dark corners of C/C++: The typedef keyword doesn’t need to be the first word on the line

Raymond ChenApril 24, 2013Apr 24, 201304/24/13

Here are some strange but legal declarations in C/C++: int typedef a; short unsigned typedef b; By convention, the typedef keyword comes at the beginning of the line, but this is not actually required by the language. The above declarations are equivalent to typedef int a; typedef short unsigned b; The C language (but not C++) also ...

Microspeak: Tenet

Raymond ChenApril 23, 2013Apr 23, 201304/23/13

In standard English, a tenet is a fundamental belief held by a group of people. At Microsoft, the term tenet is used as a generalization of what we previously called taxes: Things that everybody has to do in order to be a good software citizen. While taxes are typically very low-level and specific, like supporting roaming user profiles or...

Dreaming about games based on Unicode

Raymond ChenApril 22, 2013Apr 22, 201304/22/13

I dreamed that two of my colleagues were playing a game based on pantomiming Unicode code points. One of them got LOW QUOTATION MARK, and the other got a variety of ARROW POINTING NORTHEAST, ARROW POINTING EAST, ARROW POINTING SOUTHWEST. I wonder how you would pantomime ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER...

Getting the current selection from an Explorer window