Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 25 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 currently appears regularly on MSDN Channel 9’s One Dev Minute channel in the One Dev Question video series.

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Where is my program running from?

September 5th, 2003
Another common question: "How do I find out where my program is? I want to be able to access support files in that same directory." Answer: GetModuleFileName(NULL...
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Case mapping on Unicode is hard

September 5th, 2003
Occasionally, I'm asked, "I have to identify strings that are identical, case-insensitively.  How do I do it?" The answer is, "Well, it depends. Whose case-mapping rules do you want to use?" Sometimes the reply is, "I want this to be language-independent." Now ...
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How to recognize different types of timestamps from quite a long way away

September 5th, 2003
The great thing about timestamps is that there are so many to choose from.
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Why are the rules for GetWindowText so weird?

September 4th, 2003
Set the wayback machine to 1983.

Why is there no programmatic access to the Start menu pin list?

September 3rd, 2003
We learned our lesson the hard way. In Windows 95, we gave programmatic access to the Start menu "Fast items" list - the items that appear at the top of the Start menu above the Programs list. This area was meant for the user to customize with their favorite links, but programs quickly ...

The World Adult Kickball Association

September 2nd, 2003
"People just want to come out and have fun," Smith said. "A lot of the sports leagues out there, unless you're die-hard, unless you're so serious, people end up getting left out," he said. Not so with kickball. "People haven't done it since grade school, so it's not like people ...

Determining whether your window is covered

September 2nd, 2003
The method described in the previous coding blog entry works great if you are using the window visibility state to control painting, since you're using the paint system itself to do the heavy lifting for you. To obtain this information outside of the paint loop, use GetDC and GetClipBox...
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Even the trees are falling for the media's lies

September 1st, 2003
The White House is doing some renovating of its own (NYT, free registration required), in order to refurbish a section of the lawn that is used by television reporters so they can stand there with a nice picture of the White House behind them. But that's not why I found this story interesting. Go about halfway down the article: "The light...

Suburbs make you fat, researchers conclude

September 1st, 2003
Researchers have determined that living in the suburbs makes you fat. That and all the super-sized value meals. Speaking of super-sizing your value meal: people are tearing down their McMansions in order to build... a bigger McMansion (WSJ, paid registration required, sorry...

The default answer to every dialog box is "Cancel"

September 1st, 2003
The problem with displaying UI is that people will take every opportunity to ignore it. This story of how people deal with virus warning dialogs (via Don Browning) is a template for how users treat any unexpected dialog: They try to get rid of it. We see this time and time again...

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