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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There are two types of rebates, and you need to be on the alert

January 23rd, 2006
Many commenters to my earlier entry on sales in France had questions about rebates. Slate explained the whole rebate thing back in 2003. The short version: There are two types of rebates, manufacturer rebates and retailer rebates. Manufacturer rebates exist because they want the retail price to go down, but they are afraid that if they just...

If your callback fails, it's your responsibility to set the error code

January 23rd, 2006
There are many cases where a callback function is allowed to halt an operation. For example, you might decide to return to the message to prevent the window from being created, or you might decide to return to one of the many enumeration callback functions such as the callback. When you do this, the enclosing operation will return ...

The vtable does not always go at the start of the object

January 20th, 2006
There is no requirement that it does, and it often doesn't.

How air conditioning revolutionized competitive bicycling

January 19th, 2006
I'm not really interested in sports. Teams, standings, scores, who got traded to what team, none of that is interesting to me. What I am interested in, however, is "meta-sports": The business of sports, the technology of sports, the evolution of techniques, changes in the rules, that sort of thing. That's one of the reasons I'm a fan of the ...

The cost of trying too hard: String searching

January 19th, 2006
There are many algorithms for fast string searching, but the running of a string search is inherently O(n), where n is the length of the string being searched: If m is the length of the string being searched for (which I will call the "target string"), then any algorithm that accesses fewer than n/m elements of the string being ...

From Doom to Gloom: The story of a video game

January 18th, 2006
NPR's Morning Edition developed a series on the subject of flops, and one of their segments was devoted to the rise and fall of John Romero. You can read more about the phenomenon known as Daikatana in a huge series on Gamespot. Set aside at least an hour if you choose to read it. You can also read the Dallas Observer story that opened ...

The cost of trying too hard: Splay trees

January 18th, 2006
Often, it doesn't pay off to be too clever. Back in the 1980's, I'm told the file system group was working out what in-memory data structures to use to represent the contents of a directory so that looking up a file by name was fast. One of the experiments they tried was the splay tree. Splay trees were developed in 1985 by Sleator and Tarjan ...

ReadProcessMemory is not a preferred IPC mechanism

January 17th, 2006
Many limitations, some with security implications.

At least there's a funny side to spam

January 16th, 2006
Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines! It's pretty much what the title says. Don't forget to read the fan mail. Sometimes it's even funny...

Understanding what things mean in context: Dispatch interfaces

January 16th, 2006
Remember that you have to understand what things mean in context. For example, the IActiveMovie3 interface has a method called get_MediaPlayer. If you come into this method without any context, you might expect it to return a pointer to an IMediaPlayer interface, yet the header file says that it returns a pointer to an IDispatch interface ...