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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Answer to previous exercise about m_fRecursing

November 13th, 2003
Answer to previous exercise: The m_fRecursing flag does not need to be per-instance. It only needs to be valid long enough that the recursive call that comes immediately afterwards can be detected. However, a global variable would not work because two threads might be inside the recursive DefDlgProc call simultaneously. But a thread-local ...
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A different type of dialog procedure

November 12th, 2003
In the discussion following my entry about dialog procedure return values, somebody suggested an alternate dialog design where you just call DefDlgProc to do default actions (the same way you write window procedures and DefWindowProc) rather than returning TRUE/FALSE. So let's do that. In fact, we're going to do it twice. I'll cover one ...
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Welcome Martyn Lovell

November 11th, 2003
Martyn Lovell from the VC++ team has joined the world of blogging. Martyn is a smart guy, even though he does spell some words funny...

Safer subclassing

November 11th, 2003
Answer to yesterday's homework assignment, with discussion.
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Homework assignment about window subclassing

November 10th, 2003
Window subclassing is trickier than you think. Consider this code sketch: What could go wrong? We'll discuss it tomorrow...
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How much do you expect from a framework layer?

November 10th, 2003
If a framework exposes functionality provided by a lower layer, how hard should the framework try to insulate you from all the quirks and limitations of the lower layer? Instinctively, of course, you would say, "The framework should insulate me completely." But be careful what you ask for. If a ...

A warning to people averse to code

November 10th, 2003
This is going to be a code-heavy week. People who are averse to code may want to just lie low until next week. I'll try to make it up by having next week be more storytelling-focused...

Returning values from a dialog procedure

November 7th, 2003
For some reason, the way values are returned from a dialog procedure confuses people, so I'm going to try to explain it a different way. The trick with dialog box procedures is realizing that they actually need to return two pieces of information: ...
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Little facts you didn't know about concrete

November 6th, 2003
Concrete is stronger once it has hardened. Thanks, Associated Press! I learn something new every day...

Why are companies so worried about retraining costs?

November 6th, 2003
Remember, most people do not view the computer as a world to be explored. It is merely a means to an end. So they learn the five steps they need to follow, and if they can't do them, they get stuck. "I hit Alt+Tab like I always do, to switch to another program, but instead of switching, this strange window...

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