The Old New Thing

Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.

Latest posts

Aug 19, 2026
Post comments count 1
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On wrapping a callable in a lambda that just calls it with the same parameters

Raymond Chen

Just use the callable directly.

Aug 18, 2026
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Why did the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows have a special sticker announcing that it also had Tetris?

Raymond Chen

A contingency plan.

Aug 17, 2026
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Post likes count 3

How do functions like alloca allocate memory from the stack?

Raymond Chen

The usual probing.

Aug 14, 2026
Post comments count 8
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Forcing an ARM64X executable to run as a specific architecture

Raymond Chen

You can request the target machine architecture.

Aug 13, 2026
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A little helper class for managing LPPROC_THREAD_ATTRIBUTE_LISTs

Raymond Chen

Another RAII-style wrapper.

Aug 12, 2026
Post comments count 4
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The comments that go into code versus those that go into the pull request description

Raymond Chen

Understanding the temporal relevance.

Aug 11, 2026
Post comments count 6
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The little-known winstart.bat batch file

Raymond Chen

It had been there long before Windows 95, but nobody remembered.

Aug 10, 2026
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How can I perform a Copy­File in unbuffered mode?

Raymond Chen

Try one of the fancier alternatives to <CODE>Copy­File</CODE>.

Aug 7, 2026
Post comments count 5
Post likes count 3

Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 5

Raymond Chen

Cheating with <CODE>std::unique_ptr</CODE>.