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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Välkommen till Saerige?

Ballard is the Scandinavian neighborhood in Seattle, and they ordered some stone slabs for a new seating area in Bergen Place Park. What they didn't expect was that the Swedish stone would read S∀ERIGE. I mean, yeah, those Swedes do strange things with their A's, like put dots and circles over them, but I'm pretty sure they don't turn...

The COM interface contract rules exist for a reason

Some people believe that the COM rules on interfaces are needlessly strict. But the rules are there for a reason. Suppose you ship some interface in version N of your product. It's an internal interface, not documented to outsiders. Therefore, you are free to change it any time you want without having to worry about breaking ...

Night of the Knitting Dead

Okay, wrong zombie movie, but I couldn't resist the pun. Knit zombies reenact Dawn of the Dead. Now playing on Flickr...

The Hallowe’en-themed lobby

During the Windows 95 project, the window manager team stayed late one night and redecorated the lobby. They suspended a variety of Hallowe'en-themed objects from fishing lines: spiders, ghosts, witches, jack-o'-lanterns, that sort of thing. The fishing line went up and over pulleys, rigged so that the objects spookily rose and fell ...

Even in the enlightened year of 2005, we have programs that don’t handle long file names

When I saw Tim Sneath's description of the root cause for all the Windows Vista product key problems, I was amazed that the reason was something my readers tend to go completely ballistic over: Long file names. It so happens that one of the ISO mounting tools that people were using for installing Windows Vista doesn't support long file ...

How to recognize different types of sentinel timestamps from quite a long way away

Some time ago, I discussed several timestamp formats you might run into. Today we'll take a logical step from that information and develop a list of special values you might encounter. Note that if you apply time zone adjustments, the actual timestamp may shift by up to a day. All of these special values have one thing in common: If you see...

Without a doubt, the world’s worst online Swedish lessons

Lesson 3: Schomething schtranger (mp3) is part three of a series of four (so far) horrifically bad Swedish lessons. (Warning: Off-color content and copious swearing, but nevertheless very funny.) Boz has been living in Sweden since June, and two of his so-called friends have been putting together Swedish language tapes for him. Listen along ...

Why is the OEM code page often called ANSI?

More laziness.

PC Magazine interviews “the team behind Windows” on its twentieth birthday

PC Magazine interviewed "the team behind Windows" in commemoration of Windows' twentieth birthday. The article's author talked with Bill Gates, Charles Simonyi, Jeff Raikes, Ray Ozzie (huh? He didn't even work at Microsoft until April 2005! How could he have been part of "the team behind Windows"?), Jim Allchin, Brad Silverberg, David Cole, ...

When programs assume that the system will never change, episode 1

An example, all too frequent, of ways programs assume that the user interface will never change is reaching into system binaries and sucking out undocumented resources. In the shell, we have fallen into the reluctant position of carrying "dead" icons around for the benefit of programs that assumed that they would always be available. However, ...