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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Other things happen for a reason, too

March 6th, 2006
Today's theme is a quick one: Other Microsofties explain what at first appear to be puzzling decisions...

The ForceAutoLogon setting doesn't do what most people think

March 6th, 2006
The folks on the logon team wish me to remind you that the ForceAutoLogon setting does more than just log on an account automatically. They've had to deal with large numbers of people who set the key without really understanding what it does, and then getting into trouble because what they get is not what they expected. In addition to ...

The peculiar appeal of the Baseball Uncyclopedia

March 3rd, 2006
NPR's Only a Game interviewed the authors of The Baseball Uncyclopedia, an irreverent guide to our national pastime, and it was a blast to listen to. The two authors clearly are huge baseball fans, but they bring to it a fascination not with mind-numbing statistics but with the deep history of the sport. (Plus the fact that they disagree ...

Very late remarks on the original Chinese dictionary series

March 3rd, 2006
I have not forgotten about the Chinese/English dictionary series, but I simply haven't had the motivation to sit down and write up descriptions and discussion for the code that I wrote along the way, so instead of adding to the program, I'm going to answer some questions that were asked back when I started the series but which I didn't respond...

Martha, Martha, Martha!

March 2nd, 2006
Martha Stewart was in town this past weekend signing her book on baking. Although I'm a Martha fan, I didn't attend the signing because I already have a really awesome book on baking. I've listed below some of the ground rules for the book signing, mixed in with some stuff I just plain made up. Your mission is to pick out which of these ...

Restating the obvious about the WM_COMMAND message

March 2nd, 2006
I'm satisfied with the MSDN documentation for the message, but for the sake of mind-numbing completeness, I'm going to state the obvious in the hope that you, dear readers, can use this technique to fill in the obvious in other parts of MSDN. The one-line summary of the message says, "The WM_COMMAND message is sent when the user selects ...

Keep your eye on the code page, practical exam

March 1st, 2006
The instructions that came with my new monitor are printed in several languages. One of those languages is Polish, or at least it would be Polish if... well, you'll see. UWAGA: Szczegó³owe informacje dla u¿ytkownika znajduj¹ siê na do³¹czonej p³ycie CD. This is garbage. What they meant to write was...

Raymond, you so write like a girl

February 28th, 2006
On penmanship.

Ry Jones seems particularly amused by things I've written

February 27th, 2006
I can't believe he saves this stuff...

Changing a window class affects all windows which belong to that class

February 27th, 2006
Sometimes you need to state the obvious, and that's fine. You can learn a lot from the obvious. For example, the first topic in my PDC talk consisted of simply stating the obvious. Occasionally, when you state the obvious, you have to follow up by stating the obvious. When I pointed out that the effect of lasts only until the next , one ...