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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What are the access rights and privileges that control changing ownership of an object?

August 18th, 2005
Changing the ownership of an object (typically a file) is not difficult in principle: You call the function with the new security descriptor. The hard part is getting to that point. (Thanks to John, a colleague in security, for correcting an earlier draft of this entry.) If you have access on an object, then you can change the owner ...

What I’ll be doing at this year’s PDC

August 17th, 2005
I will be heading down to Los Angeles the Friday before the PDC in order to visit friends and relatives and to check out the King Tut exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The last time Tutankhamun came to the United States was back in the late 1970's. I was an elementary school student and a few of my classmates were lucky enough...

Why is processor affinity inherited by child processes?

August 17th, 2005
Consider why a typical program launches child processes. (Shell programs like Explorer aren't typical.) It's because the task at hand is being broken down into sub-tasks which for whatever reason has been placed into a child process. An Example of this would be, say, a multi-pass compiler/linker, where each pass is implemented as a separate ...

When people ask for security holes as features: Silent install of uncertified drivers

August 16th, 2005
Probably the single greatest source of bluescreen crashes in Windows XP is buggy device drivers. Since drivers run in kernel mode, there is no higher authority checking what they're doing. If some user-mode code runs amok and corrupts memory, it's just corrupting its own memory. The process eventually crashes, but the system stays up. On ...

On being attacked by a sidewalk

August 15th, 2005
Yesterday, I was attacked by a sidewalk. I was cycling from work to a friend's house for dinner and was northbound in the shoulder on 172nd Ave NE in Redmond. As I reached the intersection with NE 138th St., I was momentarily distracted, perhaps by my water bottle, I forget. This lapse of attention resulted in my failing to notice...

The poor man’s way of identifying memory leaks

August 15th, 2005
There is a variety of tools available for identifying resource leaks, but there's one method that requires no tools or special compiler switches or support libraries: Just let the leak continue until the source becomes blatantly obvious. Nightly automated stress testing is a regular part of any project. Some teams use screen savers as the ...

Adding a lookup control to the dictionary: Searching Pinyin

August 12th, 2005
Finally we start searching. For now, the search algorithm is going to be very simple: The string you type into the edit control will be treated as the start of a Pinyin word or phrase. We'll make it fancier later. Here is where a lot of the groundwork (some of which I called out explicitly and some of which I slipped in without calling ...

Whatever you do, don’t ask for coffee

August 11th, 2005
Heather Hamilton makes an odd discovery on her flight to Seattle...

Adding a lookup control to the dictionary: Just getting it on the screen

August 11th, 2005
When we last left the dictionary project, we were able to display the dictionary entries but hadn't yet gotten around to searching it. Today, we'll place the lookup control, though we won't hook it up until next time. First, we give the edit control an ID and create some member variables to keep track of it. class RootWindow : public ...

Why is Windows Error Reporting nicknamed “Dr. Watson”?

August 10th, 2005
The nickname for the feature known as Windows Error Reporting is "Dr. Watson". Where did that name come from? As you have probably guessed, The name Dr. Watson was inspired by the character of Dr. Watson, the assistant to Sherlock Holmes in the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. It is my understanding that the doctor was ...