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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"I attack the kobold wearing the headdress made of human ears"

January 31st, 2006
If you dare, spend eleven minutes of your life watching the most painfully compelling mockumentary on the lives of two basement fantasy role playing gamers. (via Chris Williams...

Liquefied NBA points apparently cannot be sold on eBay

January 30th, 2006
Of course we don't find this out until somebody tries. (Google cache for a limited time only...

Why does a corrupted binary sometimes result in “Program too big to fit in memory”?

January 30th, 2006
Because the program isn't actually corrupted. Sort of.

Waiting for all handles with MsgWaitForMultipleObjects is a bug waiting to happen

January 27th, 2006
The and functions allow you to specify whether you want to want for any or all of the handles (either by passing or by passing , accordingly). But you never want to wait for all handles. Waiting for all handles means that the call does not return unless all the handles are signalled and a window message meeting your wake criteria has ...

Stephen Tolouse's reminiscences of Windows 95 RTM day

January 26th, 2006
Stephen Tolouse (known around Microsoft as "stepto", pronounced "step-toe") from the Microsoft Security Response Center reminisces about Windows 95 RTM. Stephen mentions that "the build numbers were artificially inflated to reach 950". There's actually a technical reason for this inflation, which I intend to write about when I have the ...

Pumping messages while waiting for a period of time

January 26th, 2006
We can use the function (or its superset ) to carry out a non-polling "sleep while processing messages". This function pumps messages for up to milliseconds. The kernel of the idea is merely to use the function as a surrogate for , pumping messages until the cumulative timeout has been reached. There are a lot of small details to pay ...

Welcome to the United States, unless you're a Canadian technologist who is an invited guest at a Microsoft conference, in which case, keep out

January 25th, 2006
Vancouver technologist Darren Barefoot was invited to Redmond by the MSN Search team but was stopped by Immigration and denied entry. Ultimately, the customs agents concluded that because Microsoft was covering my flight and accommodation, I was being compensated for consulting activities. In order to enter the country, I'd need a work ...

You can call MsgWaitForMultipleObjects with zero handles

January 25th, 2006
There is no function, but you can create your own with the assistance of the function. To wait for a message with timeout, we use the in a vacuous sense: You pass it a list of objects you want to wait for, as well as a timeout and a set of queue states, asking that the function return when any of the objects is signalled or when a ...

Creepy messages in your baggage

January 24th, 2006
Heather Leigh had a creepy experience with her baggage last week. The story continued yesterday. I'm watching to see how things turn out...

Performance consequences of polling

January 24th, 2006
Polling kills. A program should not poll as a matter of course. Doing so can have serious consequences on system performance. It's like checking your watch every minute to see if it's 3 o'clock yet instead of just setting an alarm. First of all, polling means that a small amount of CPU time gets eaten up at each poll even though there is ...