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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The evolution of dialog templates – 16-bit Classic Templates

In the history of Windows, there have been four versions of dialog templates. And despite the changes, you'll see that they're basically all the same. First, there was the classic Windows 1.0 dialog template. It starts like this: Notice that this is where the 255-controls-per-dialog limit comes from on 16-bit Windows, since the field ...

Too late, Mr. Jenkins. You were an F7 back at question 2

The story of somebody who worked for a job screening service. Companies hired the service to do preliminary filtering of job applicants. The best part: When applicants mistake the screener for the receptionist. When I launched into the actual interview, it really pissed them off. They'd get furious that the freaking receptionist had...

Tweaked comment policy

Along the navband on the left hand side is a link to the comment policy. The most significant change since its first release is that I introduced the two-week rule. As a general rule, comments posted more than two weeks after the article publication are eligible for summary deletion. It's great that you're all interested n stuff, but...

The evolution of dialog templates – Introduction

In the history of Windows, there have been four versions of dialog templates. And despite the changes, you'll see that they're basically all the same. My secret goal in this six-part series is to address questions people have had along the lines of "I'm trying to generate a dialog template in code, and it's not working. What am I ...

Exploding frying pans

Last year there was a recall of exploding frying pans. For some reason I found this funny. "The pans can explode or separate when preheated, used on high heat or used for frying," the safety commission said in a statement. It explodes when you fry something in it. Apparently "frying stuff" was not in the test plan for the frying...

Verifying that your system files are digitally signed

If you want to re-check that the files on your system haven't been tampered with, you can run sigverif (by typing its name into the Start.Run dialog) and tell it to start scanning. (UI note: If you go into the Logging page on the Advanced dialog, you can get trapped where it insists on having a valid log file name even if you didn't ...

Anybody remember Blade Squad or MV24?

It's often fun to go back and see the kooky ideas for television shows that floated around years ago. Here are some from 1997: Plenty more on the linked web site. What's really scary is that a lot of these kooky ideas turned into actual television programs...

What was the purpose of the hPrevInstance parameter to WinMain?

Once your average GUI program picks itself up off the ground, control begins at your WinMain function. The second parameter, hPrevInstance, is always zero in Win32 programs. Certainly it had a meaning at some point? Of course it did. In 16-bit Windows there was a function called GetInstanceData. This function took an HINSTANCE, a ...

Augusto Pinochet's beverage preferences are a matter of national security

It appears that Augusto Pinochet's beverage preferences are a matter of national security. The web site offers the original and redacted versions of the same document, so you can see what sorts of information the U.S. government considers to be worthy of redaction. On a related redactorial note, researchers demonstrated last month ...

Norway works to lengthen its lead

Norway locks its grip on "Best place to live" status: As I pointed out last month, this then leads to... Shoulda studied Norwegian like I had planned to do originally before I got sidetracked by Swedish...