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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Psychic debugging: Why your expensive four-processor machine is ignoring three of its processors

March 21st, 2005
On one of our internal mailing lists, someone was wondering why their expensive four-processor computer appeared to be using only one of its processors. From Task Manager's performance tab, the chart showed that the first processor was doing all the work and the other three processors were sitting idle. Using Task Manager to set each process's...

Confusion over whether you have Windows XP SP1 or SP2

March 18th, 2005
Some support people have asked me why the "About" dialog seems to be kind of schizophrenic as to whether a machine has Windows XP SP1 or SP2. About Windows Microsoft® Windows Version 5.1 (Build 2600.xpsp2.040919-1003 : Service Pack 1) Copyright© 1981-2001 Microsoft Corporation Why does the version string say "xpsp2...

Your exception handler can encounter an exception

March 17th, 2005
Consider the following code, written in C# just for kicks; the problem is generic to any environment that supports exception handling. Some time later, you find yourself facing an assertion failure from claiming that you are destroying the document while there are still active plugins. But there is your call to , and it's in a block, and...

Competing to be the worst-dressed couple in America

March 17th, 2005
The U.S. cable network TLC is putting on a special episode of What Not to Wear devoted to identifying the worst-dressed couple in America. It so happens that one of my friends knows one of the finalists, so we'll be rooting for them. Or is it against them? Are you supposed to hope that your favorite is in fact the worst-dressed? Or should ...

The great Alaskan ice sculpture

March 16th, 2005
NPR interviewed John Reeves, the artist behind a 160-foot-tall mountain of ice in Alaska. The man has a down-home aw-shucks kind of demeanor that I found quite charming. I'm a middle-aged guy that has a lot of time in the winter and a little bit of extra money to play with, so my hobby was to see how big an ice hill I could grow. I started ...

Windows NT Security in Theory and Practice

March 16th, 2005
Today, I'm not writing anything new. Instead, I'm referring you to the series of articles by Ruediger Asche starting with Windows NT Security in Theory and Practice. These articles are quite old but the principles are still sound. Just bear in mind that the newer stuff won't be covered...

Windows are not cheap objects

March 15th, 2005
Although Windows is centered around, well, windows, a window itself is not a cheap object. What's more, the tight memory constraints of systems of 1985 forced various design decisions. Let's take for example the design of the list box control. In a modern design, you might design the list box control as accepting a list of child windows, each...

Dot-Con Job: How InfoSpace took its investors for a ride

March 14th, 2005
The Seattle Times ran an excellent series last week on the rise and fall of InfoSpace and its charismatic leader, Naveen Jain, who at one point even used the phrase "cult leader" to refer to himself. To set the tone, and perhaps to serve as a reference while you read the series, here's a list of reported Infospace earnings per share (...

A subtlety in restoring previous window position

March 14th, 2005
A common feature for many applications is to record their screen location when they shut down and reopen at that location when relaunched. If implemented naively, a program merely restores from its previous position unconditionally. You run into usability problems with this naive implementation. If a user runs two copies of your program, the ...

VegFest 2005 this weekend – and – vegetarian is as vegetarian does

March 11th, 2005
The weekend of March 12th and 13th, Vegetarians of Washington is hosting VegFest 2005, a festival of vegetarian food. This reminds me of a Time Magazine cover story from July 2002, wherein it was revealed that... In a survey of 11,000 individuals, 37% of those who responded "Yes, I am a vegetarian" also reported that in the previous 24 ...