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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Displaying the dictionary, part 1: Naive version

June 13th, 2005
We return briefly to the ongoing Chinese/English dictionary series and write some code to display all the definitions we had worked so hard to collect. (I figure you're anxious to see something on the screen, so I am going to handle the Traditional Chinese/Simplified Chinese issue later. For now, the "Simplified" column will be blank.) ...

Maintaining high standards at the International Frederic Chopin Piano Competition

June 10th, 2005
The quintennial International Frederick Chopin Piano Competition will be held later this year, and I was reminded that the awards for "Best performance of a mazurka" and "Best performance of a concerto" have not been awarded since 1985. Simply put: Nobody since 1985 has been good enough to deserve it. The year 1995 was a particularly bad ...

Why does Explorer eject the CD after you finish burning it?

June 10th, 2005
Partly as a convenience, but partly to work around buggy hardware. The developer responsible for CD burning explained it to me. Most CD drives cache information about the disc in their internal memory to improve performance. However, some drives have a bug where they fail to update the cache after the CD has been written to. As a result, you ...

Why can't the default drag/drop behavior be changed?

June 9th, 2005
A common reaction to my explanation of whether dragging a file will result in a move or copy was that there should be a setting that lets you change the algorithm by which Explorer decides whether you want to move or copy. There are a few reasons why this is a bad idea. First, if there were such a setting, then it removes some of the ...

Can you trust the Man on the Street interview?

June 8th, 2005
Occasionally, in a news story, the reporter will ask for comments or opinion from a passer-by (nicknamed "the man on the street"). Greg Packer has created a second career as that man. In the last 10 years, he's been quoted at least a dozen times by the New York Post. He's been quoted at least 14 times by the Daily News, most recently just ...

Why don't control panel programs and property sheets show up in the taskbar?

June 8th, 2005
Control panel programs and property sheets don't show up in the taskbar. Why not? As I recall, the explanation was that control panel programs and property sheets aren't applications. They are auxiliary helper windows that assist you with a task, but they aren't a program in their own right. Therefore, they don't get a taskbar button. I've ...

Answer to quick puzzle about security and synchronization

June 7th, 2005
As many people quickly figured out, the reason why the the returns immediately is that the call is failing. The reason is that the second process opened the handle with access, which grants permission to call the function, the function, and the fatally flawed function, but it doesn't include access, which is necessary if you ...

What if two programs did this?

June 7th, 2005
Another thought experiment when thinking through a feature.

Adam Felber teaches us how to avoid setting off motion detectors

June 6th, 2005
In a sidebar discussion on this week's episode of Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, Adam Felber explains that "you can foil most motion detectors with a pair of insulated gloves, a piece of plywood, and a hat." [Windows Media] [RealPlayer...

A quick puzzle about security and synchronization

June 6th, 2005
This quick puzzle floated past one of our internal discussion groups. In Process B, the succeeds, but the returns immediately instead of waiting. Explain. [Correction: I confused the matter by passing as the third parameter, thereby creating an event that is initially signalled. Change it to so that the event is created non-...