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.

Post by this author

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

Mapping the generic concept to specific file types.

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

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?

Trying to look like somebody else.

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

They go all over the place.

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

You can shadow it with something useless.

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

Coincidentally valid, but not what you think.

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

It sort of depends on why you're comparing them.

The odd cadence of narrative engineering design documents

Following the rubric off a cliff.

Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

The common pattern of trying to delete yourself.

On transferring or copying ABI pointers between smart pointers

Keep track of who owns the reference.