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

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 ...

Adding flags to APIs to work around driver bugs doesn't scale

April 5th, 2006
Some people suggested, as a solution to the network interoperability compatibility problem, adding a flag to to indicate whether the caller wanted to use fast or slow enumeration. Adding a flag to work around a driver bug doesn't actually solve anything in the long term. Considering all the video driver bugs that Windows has had to work...

German adjectives really aren't that hard; they just look that way

April 4th, 2006
I may have scared a bunch of people with that chart of German adjective endings, but as several commenters noted, native speakers don't refer to the charts; they just say what comes naturally. (Well, except for Leo Petr, who claims that native Russian speakers actually study these charts in grade school.) Commenter Helga Waage noted that ...

Spamming the event log doesn't make things any better

April 4th, 2006
A common suggestion is that if a problem is detected which the system automatically recovered from but which an administrator might be interested in knowing about, then an event log entry should be created. Be careful, however, not to abuse the event log in the process. If the problem is not security-related and it can occur, say, more than a...

What seventh-grade students want to be when they grow up

April 3rd, 2006
Another episode in the sporadic series on the wisdom of seventh graders: The topic this time is "What do you want to be when you grow up?" The students really enjoyed this topic because, as one young man put it, "I could write a book about myself!" Here are what some students had to say. Spelling mistakes are intact, but ellipses are editorial...

Doing the best we can until time travel has been perfected

April 3rd, 2006
Mistakes were made. Mistakes such as having Windows NT put Notepad in a different location from Windows 3.1. (Though I'm sure they had their reasons.) Mistakes such as having a when there is already a style. Mistakes such as having listview state images be one-biased, whereas treeview state images are zero-biased. But what's ...

The network interoperability compatibility problem, first follow-up of many

March 31st, 2006
Okay, there were an awful lot of comments yesterday and it will take me a while to work through them all. But I'll start with some more background on the problem and clarifying some issues that people had misinterpreted. As a few people surmised, the network file server software in question is Samba, a version of which comes with most ...