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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News for dummies in French and English

April 12th, 2006
In case you didn't get the joke, "News for dummies" is just my nickname for the news designed for non-native speakers. It tends to be spoken more slowly and use less advanced vocabulary. I use the term because I'm the dummy, you see. If I were smart, then I'd use the news for native speakers. (Sometimes I give it a shot and then my head ...

Why is the Microsoft Protection Service called "msmpsvc"?

April 12th, 2006
(This is the first in a series of short posts on where Microsoft products got their names.) The original name for the malware protection service was "mpsvc" the "Microsoft Protection Service", but it was discovered later that that filename was already used by malware! As a result, the name of the service had to be changed by sticking an "ms...

What's the deal with the house in front of Microsoft's RedWest campus?

April 11th, 2006
What's the deal with the house in front of Microsoft's RedWest campus? Here is my understanding. It may be incomplete or even flat-out wrong. The house belongs to a couple who was unwilling to sell their property when Microsoft's real estate people were buying up the land on which to build the RedWest campus. (I'm told it was originally a ...

You'd think it'd be easy to give away a ticket to the symphony

April 10th, 2006
I'm sort of the ringleader of a group of friends who go in together on a block of tickets to the Seattle Symphony. I bought a pair of tickets in the block, one for myself, and one for a rotating guest. And for some reason, I had a hard time finding a guest for last weekend's concert. Of course, six of my friends have already been ruled out...

Be very careful if you decide to change the rules after the game has ended

April 10th, 2006
One suggestion for addressing the network compatibility problem was returning an error code like which means "Um, the server ran into a problem. Please start over." This is basically the same as the "do nothing" option, because the server is already returning an error code specifically for this problem, namely, . Now, sure, that error doesn'...

News for dummies now available in podcast form

April 7th, 2006
I'm probably the only person who uses the "News for dummies" links in the navigation pane on this page, and now I'm going to use them even less. The Swedish news for dummies recently became available in podcast form [RSS], joining the German news for dummies, which has been available as a podcast [RSS] since the beginning of the year. (...

Computing over a high-latency network means you have to bulk up

April 7th, 2006
One of the big complaints about Explorer we've received from corporations is how often it accesses the network. If the computer you're accessing is in the next room, then accessing it a large number of times isn't too much of a problem since you get the response back rather quickly. But if the computer you're talking to is halfway around the ...

Sometimes you just have to make a snap decision

April 6th, 2006
Saturday afternoon, my phone rings. "Hello?" "Quick! We're on our way to the nursery. Do you want to come?" I recognize the voice as one of my friends who recently bought a house and presumably is doing some spring landscaping. But I have to answer fast. Time for a snap decision. "No." My friend seems surprised that I give my answer so ...

It's more efficient when you buy in bulk

April 6th, 2006
The Windows XP kernel does not turn every call into into a packet on the network. Rather, the first time an application calls , it issues a bulk query to the server and returns the first result to the application. Thereafter, when an application calls , it returns the next result from the buffer. If the buffer is empty, then issues a ...

USER and GDI compatibility in Windows Vista

April 5th, 2006
My colleague Nick Kramer who works over on WPF has the first of what will be a series of articles on USER and GDI compatibility in Windows Vista. The changes to tighten security, improve support for East Asian languages, and take the desktop to a new level with the Desktop Window Manager (among others) make for quite an interesting ...