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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Positioned vs. non-positioned listview views

July 12th, 2004
Occasionally, I'll see a question that betrays a lack of understanding of difference between the positioned and non-positioned listview views. The question usually goes along the lines of "I inserted an item with LVM_INSERTITEM but it went to the end of the list instead of in the location I inserted it." To understand what is going on, ...

How does Add/Remove Programs get the size and other information?

July 9th, 2004
If the program doesn't provide this information itself, Add/Remove Programs is forced to guess. The problem is that there is no "obvious" way to map an entry in the Add/Remove Programs list to an actual program. Each entry in the list, for those who care about such things, comes from the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\...

Lighting organic material and sucking it into your lungs

July 8th, 2004
Last year, The Philip Morris Companies renamed itself to the warm-and-fuzzy sounding Altria Group. Gotta love the colorful abstract logo they've got. (Psst, editors of the Altria home page: It's "Whom We Fund". "Whom" with an "m".) They claim the name comes from the Latin altus ("high") but that doesn't explain where the "r" comes ...

Why does icon text get a solid background if drop shadows are disabled?

July 8th, 2004
A commenter asks why icon label have "those ugly color boxes" when there is a background image. The answer: Because the alternative would be worse. Imagine if there were no solid background between the text and the background image. You would end up with text against an unpredictable background, which doesn't help readability. Take...

Obtaining a window's size and position while it is minimized

July 7th, 2004
If you have a minimized window and want to know where it will go when you restore it, the GetWindowPlacement function will tell you. In particular, the tells you where the window would go if it were restored (as opposed to minimized or maximized). One perhaps-non-obvious flag is WPF_RESTORETOMAXIMIZED. This flag indicates that the ...

Differences between managers and programmers, part 2

July 7th, 2004
If you are attending a presentation, you can tell whether the person at the lectern is a manager or a programmer by looking at their PowerPoint presentation. If it's black-and-white, all-text, multimedia-free, and rarely has more than ten bullet points on a page, then the presenter is probably a programmer. If it's colorful, with ...

Obtaining a window’s size and position while it is minimized

July 7th, 2004
If you have a minimized window and want to know where it will go when you restore it, the GetWindowPlacement function will tell you. In particular, the tells you where the window would go if it were restored (as opposed to minimized or maximized). One perhaps-non-obvious flag is WPF_RESTORETOMAXIMIZED. This flag indicates that the ...

Diagnosing a problem with calling conventions

July 6th, 2004
Putting together some skills you've already learned.

Differences between managers and programmers

July 6th, 2004
If you find yourself in a meeting with a mix of managers and programmers, here's one way to tell the difference between them: Look at what they brough to the meeting. Did they bring a laptop computer? Score bonus points if the laptop computer is actually turned on during the meeting or if the laptop is special in some way (e.g., it ...

Another chance to see Elvis take on a mummy

July 5th, 2004
For those in the Seattle area who missed it last year, The Fremont Outdoor Cinema is screening Bubba Ho-Tep on Friday, July 9th. Go see it. You won't be disappointed. Assuming what you were expecting to see was Elvis fighting a mummy. With the help of JFK. In a wheelchair. If you were expecting something else, then okay maybe you'...