Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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How does Explorer calculate the “Date” of a file?

September 21st, 2023
Mapping the generic concept to specific file types.

Why does my C++/WinRT project get unresolved externals for constructors?

September 20th, 2023
You forgot to include the namespace header file, didn't you.

Why did the 16-bit _lopen and _lcreat function return -1 on failure instead of 0?

September 19th, 2023
Trying to look like somebody else.

When looking to free up disk space, don’t forget your symbol file caches

September 18th, 2023
They go all over the place.

How can I prevent myself from using a parameter after I’ve extracted all value from it?

September 15th, 2023
You can shadow it with something useless.

I accidentally performed an operation on INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE, and it worked: What just happened?

September 14th, 2023
Coincidentally valid, but not what you think.

How do I perform a case-insensitive comparison of two strings in the Deseret script?

September 13th, 2023
It sort of depends on why you're comparing them.

The odd cadence of narrative engineering design documents

September 12th, 2023
Following the rubric off a cliff.

Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

September 11th, 2023
The common pattern of trying to delete yourself.

On transferring or copying ABI pointers between smart pointers

September 8th, 2023
Keep track of who owns the reference.