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

It's a good idea to get somebody who knows the language to be your proofreader

June 15th, 2006
If you're going to use text from another language, it behooves you to get somebody who knows the language to be your proofreader. Those who fail to heed this advice with respect to Chinese characters may end up featured on Hanzi Smatter 一知半解, which starts with a book titled A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols whose ...

Window class properties apply to all windows that belong to the class

June 15th, 2006
Window class properties apply to all windows that belong to the class. That's why they're called class properties. This seems like an obvious thing to say when put in so many words, but I see many "solutions" that lose sight of this simple fact. All the properties that you set in the (or ) are window class properties, as are the properties...

Pitfalls of transparent rendering of anti-aliased fonts

June 14th, 2006
Windows provides a variety of technologies for rendering monochrome text on color displays, taking advantage of display characteristics to provide smoother results. These include grayscale anti-aliasing as well as the more advanced ClearType technique. Both of these methods read from the background pixels to decide what pixels to draw in the...

Lies and statistics: 600,000 Chinese engineers

June 13th, 2006
Everybody "knows" that China produced 600,000 engineers in 2004 (as compared to 70,000 in the United States), but Carl Bialik at the Wall Street Journal [corrected 9:30am] smelled something funny, so he chased the source of the numbers to see whether this "fact" was indeed true. It wasn't. NPR interviewed a Duke professor whose class ...

Fumbling around in the dark and stumbling across the wrong solution

June 13th, 2006
I don't mean to pick on this series of entries, but it illustrates an interesting pattern of stumbling across the wrong "solution". The series begins by attempting to trigger the system's monitor blank timeout by posting a message to the desktop window. As we saw earlier, the desktop window is a very special window and as a rule should be...

Remember what happens when you broadcast a message

June 12th, 2006
Occasionally I catch people doing things like broadcasting a message to all top-level windows. This is one of those things that is so obviously wrong I don't see how people even thought to try it in the first place. Suppose you broadcast the message What happens? Every top-level window receives the message with the same parameters, ...

What happened to the traffic circle at the corner of 156th Ave NE and NE 56th Way?

June 9th, 2006
Windows Live Local and Google Maps both show a traffic circle at the corner of 156th Ave NE and NE 56th Way, but if you pay the intersection a visit in person, you won't find one. It was replaced with a speed bump in 2005. Why? I stumbled across the explanation completely by happenstance. There was a small article in the local newspaper ...

Why did the Add or Remove Programs control panel try to guess all that information?

June 9th, 2006
As we saw earlier, the "Add or Remove Programs" control panel used several heuristics to attempt to determine things like program size and frequency of user. Why did it bother doing this at all? At the time the feature was added, disk space was not cheap like it is today. One of the problems users were having was running out of disk space ...

The forgotten common controls: The MenuHelp function

June 8th, 2006
The function is one of the more confusing ones in the common controls library. Fortunately, you will almost certainly never had need to use it, and once you learn the history of the function, you won't want to use it anyway. Our story begins with 16-bit Windows. The message is sent to notify a window of changes in the selection state of ...

Disaster averted, thanks to undisclosed government action, no really

June 7th, 2006
On his web site, http://www.savelivesinmay.com, Eric Julien predicted that (and I hope I got this right) on May 25, 2006, comet fragments generated in 1995 by a hostile extraterrestrial civilization would impact the Atlantic Ocean near the Azores, followed by volcanic eruptions which would create a giant tsunami that would wipe out the ...