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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Dinner at the Herbfarm in Woodinville

July 25th, 2005
As part of the going-away festivities for my friend, a group of us went to The Herbfarm, the local restaurant referenced in Clue I of Puzzle #3. The restaurant is nestled in the Sammamish Valley, right next to the Willows Lodge resort and its restaurant, The Barking Frog. Less than a kilometer down the road is the Chateau Ste. ...

On paying for your meal upon leaving a restaurant

July 25th, 2005
Robert Scoble's embarrassment over forgetting to pay a restaurant bill reminds me of an even more embarrassing incident experienced by a component team from the Windows 95 team. To celebrate something or other, their team went to lunch at The Salish Lodge, a fine dining establishment. At the end of the meal, everybody thought somebody...

Marin Alsop to be music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

July 22nd, 2005
Marin Alsop has been selected to lead the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. The development has gotten a lot of attention, presumably, because this makes Maestra Alsop (as she prefers to be called) the first woman to be named music director of a major U.S. orchestra. I saw her perform in Seattle earlier this year and thought she did a fine job. ...

The importance of passing the WT_EXECUTELONGFUNCTION flag to QueueUserWorkItem

July 22nd, 2005
One of the flags to the QueueUserWorkItem function is WT_EXECUTELONGFUNCTION. The documentation for that flag reads The callback function can perform a long wait. This flag helps the system to decide if it should create a new thread. As noted in the documentation, the thread pool uses this flag to decide whether it should create a new ...

News flash: Going for a walk on a nice day makes you feel better

July 21st, 2005
Scientists continue to amaze us with their research breakthroughs, such as a discovery late last year that going for a walk on a nice day makes you feel better. What would we do without science...

FindFirstFile is not a SQL query

July 21st, 2005
The function is not a SQL query. It's a very simple directory enumerator. There is a slightly fancier version called , but even that function doesn't add much at present beyond filtering for directories or devices. You don't get to pass it sort criteria like or "return the files/directories sorted smallest file first", or "return the ...

The Northwest Mahler Festival performs Mahler’s Second Symphony (“Resurrection”)

July 20th, 2005
Last night I attended the Northwest Mahler Festival's performance of Mahler's Second Symphony (The Resurrection). The concert opened with Copland's El Salón México and Barber's Prayers of Kierkegaard. [Typo fixed 12:30pm] The Copland was kind of shaky, in a way that I couldn't quite put a finger on. The wind balance seemed a ...

Why does FindFirstFile find short names?

July 20th, 2005
The function matches both the short and long names. This can produce somewhat surprising results. For example, if you ask for "*.htm", this also gives you the file "x.html" since its short name is "X~1.HTM". Why does it bother matching short names? Shouldn't it match only long names? After all, only old 16-bit programs use short names. ...

What is the deal with the ES_OEMCONVERT flag?

July 19th, 2005
The edit control style is a holdover from 16-bit Windows. This ancient MSDN article from the Windows 3.1 SDK describes the flag thus: ES_OEMCONVERT causes text entered into the edit control to be converted from ANSI to OEM and then back to ANSI. This ensures proper character conversion when the application calls the AnsiToOem function to ...

Watching the game of “Telephone” play out on the Internet

July 18th, 2005
Let's see if I can get this straight. First, Chris Pirillo says (timecode 37:59) he's not entirely pleased with the word "podcast" in Episode 11 of This Week in Tech. The Seattle-PI then reports that the sentiment is shared with "several Microsoft employees" who have coined the word "blogcast" to replace it. Next, c|net picks up the story...