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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A C# LINQ one-liner to check if exactly one of a set of conditions is met

February 26th, 2024
Maybe not the most efficient, but it's easy to write.

Gotcha: Be careful how you shut down your dispatcher queues

February 23rd, 2024
The dispatcher queue thread isn't useful after it has shut down, so don't try anything.

Gotcha: Don’t forget to shut down your dispatcher queues

February 22nd, 2024
Keep that dispatcher queue controller around, or you'll never be able to clean up.

Once your object reaches final_release, you are committed to destructing it (eventually)

February 21st, 2024
Don't try to resurrect it.

Microspeak: Closing out, duping out

February 20th, 2024
Making work items no longer appear on a query.

Why can’t I trigger a manual blue screen crash by injecting the magic key sequence?

February 19th, 2024
It has to come from the physical keyboard, because that's the code that detects the magic key sequence.

If you’re just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

February 16th, 2024
How to be inert.

Registered command lines are just command lines, not a programming language

February 15th, 2024
If you want a programming language, you know where to find one.

Functions that return the size of a required buffer generally return upper bounds, not tight bounds

February 14th, 2024
An over-estimate is better than an under-estimate.

It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway: Attacking a domain administrator from the local administrator

February 13th, 2024
If you pwn the machine, then you pwn everyone on the machine.