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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Is there an exclusionary rule in Sweden?

January 11th, 2004
According to Friday's Klartext (note: link valid only for one week, then it gets overwritten by the next Friday's Klartext), Vi ska börjar klartext med berätta att en åklagare nu ska undersöka om fler än två hundra poliser i Sverige har brutit mot lagen. Poliserna letade rätt på information om ...

Ten-year-old + Microsoft Flight Simulator = terrorist

January 9th, 2004
Apparently a ten-year-old who put Microsoft Flight Simulator on his Christmas wish-list became the subject of a terrorism investigation. (Warning: I suspect that link will go stale in a week, so read it while you still can.) As always, The Register puts a snarky spin on the story...

Why do member functions need to be "static" to be used as a callback?

January 9th, 2004
As we learned yesterday, nonstatic member functions take a secret "this" parameter, which makes them incompatible with the function signature required by Win32 callbacks. Fortunately, nearly all callbacks provide some way of providing context. You can shove the "this" pointer into the context so you can reconstruct the source object. Here's ...

It's called "proofreading", give it a shot why don't you

January 8th, 2004
Like everybody else, I was checking out the new MSN home page and I clicked over to the tour. And right there as their top headline in the sample web page, it says, "Wierd items of the future". Ahem. It's spelled w-e-i-r-d. And on all of the MSN properties, like local city guides, you can see MSN's new motto: "More Useful Everyday". Um, ...

Budget cuts strike Swedish radio

January 8th, 2004
Alas, budget cuts over at Sveriges Radio have reduced the staff of Klartext, the Swedish news program presented in easy Swedish, from three to two, so they won't be able to provide text summaries of the radio show. I had been using the summaries to help me fill in the gaps I had missed, but now I guess I'll just have to listen even more ...

The history of calling conventions, part 3

January 8th, 2004
Okay, here we go: The 32-bit x86 calling conventions. (By the way, in case people didn't get it: I'm only talking in the context of calling conventions you're likely to encounter when doing Windows programming or which are used by Microsoft compilers. I do not intend to cover calling conventions for other operating systems or that are specific...

Words I'd like to ban in 2004

January 7th, 2004
It seems to be fashionable to do a "top words" list this time of year. We have Google 2003 Zeitgeist, Top Yahoo! Searches 2003, Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year for 2003, YourDictionary.com's Top Ten Words of 2003, Lake Superior State University's Banished Words List for 2004; still waiting for the American Dialect Society's choice for ...

The history of calling conventions, part 2

January 7th, 2004
Foreshadowing: This information will actually be useful in a future discussion. Well, not the fine details, but you may notice something that explains... um... it's hard to describe. Just wait for it. Curiously, it is only the 8086 and x86 platforms that have multiple calling conventions. All the others have only one! Now we're going deep ...

Why does the copy dialog give such horrible estimates?

January 6th, 2004
It's difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future.

Why does the x86 have so few registers?

January 5th, 2004
A walk back through history.

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