The Old New Thing

May 2013 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

The importance of remembering parity in a back-and-forth race on your flying bicycle

May 20, 2013 May 20, 2013 05/20/13
Raymond Chen
I dreamed that one of my friends had made the U.S. cycling team. (Perhaps because everybody else got busted for doping.) Even more implausibly, I also made the team. To celebrate, he challenged me to a short race. The path ran along a river, in which a medium-sized boat was setting sail. Our bicycles somehow could fly (which we considered ...

Who sends the initial WM_UPDATEUISTATE message?

May 17, 2013 May 17, 2013 05/17/13
Raymond Chen
Last time, we looked at the confusingly-named WM_UPDATE­UI­STATE and WM_CHANGE­UI­STATE messages. But how does the whole indicator thingie get off the ground? The default state for a window is to show all indicators. But as a special trick, the dialog manager will send a WM_UPDATE­UI­STATE message with ...

What does GDI use biXPelsPerMeter and SetBitmapDimensionEx for?

May 15, 2013 May 15, 2013 05/15/13
Raymond Chen
What does GDI use and for? Nothing. The and are completely ignored by GDI when loading a bitmap. The values are there for the benefit of image-editing programs who want to record additional information about the bitmap, but GDI ignores them. Similarly, the and functions update a structure associated with each bitmap, but GDI ...

Microspeak: booked

May 14, 2013 May 14, 2013 05/14/13
Raymond Chen
Remember, the term Microspeak is not tightly scoped to mean jargon used only at Microsoft. It's jargon used at Microsoft more often than in general usage. Today, it's a term that you really need to master if you want to talk with others about project planning. To book a feature is to commit to implementing the feature, including assigning ...

The secret lair of Administrative Assistants

May 13, 2013 May 13, 2013 05/13/13
Raymond Chen
I dreamed that a colleague and I were looking for a copy of a TN3270 emulator in order to investigate a bug. The search took us into an abandoned-looking Building 5. But upon entering, we discovered that Building 5 was actually the secret lair of all the Administrative Assistants. Oh, and we eventually found the bug in TN3270. It ...

How can I display a live screenshot of a piece of another application?

May 13, 2013 May 13, 2013 05/13/13
Raymond Chen
Today's Little Program takes a rectangular portion of another application and continuously replicates it in its own client area. You might want to do this if you want to monitor a portion of an application like a custom progress bar, and the application doesn't use the Windows 7 taskbar progress indicator feature. (Maybe it's an old ...