Raymond Chen, Author at The Old New Thing

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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Bad version number checks

February 13th, 2004

Version numbers. Very important. And so many people check them wrong. This is why Windows 95's GetVersion function returned 3.95 instead of 4.0. A lot of code checked the version number like this: Now consider what happens when the version number is reported as 4.0. The major version check passes, but the minor version check fails since 0...

TEXT vs. _TEXT vs. _T, and UNICODE vs. _UNICODE

February 12th, 2004

Different settings for different components.

Improbable Research comes to Seattle

February 12th, 2004

The lunatics behind The Annals of Improbable Research and The Ig Nobel Prize will be in Seattle tomorrow night, Feburary 13. The meeting schedule lists the AIR presentation as "8:00PM-10:30PM, Special Event: Annals of Improbable Research (open to all registrants), Sheraton Hotel, Third Floor, Metropolitan Ballroom". The AIR folks said "Open to...

Sure, we do that

February 11th, 2004

The DirectX video driver interface for Windows 95 had a method that each driver exposed called something like "DoesDriverSupport(REFGUID guidCapability)" where we handed it a capability GUID and it said whether or not that feature was supported. There were various capability GUIDs defined, things like GUID_CanStretchAlpha to ask the ...

Dunkin Donuts vs. Krispy Kreme

February 11th, 2004

Having grown up on the east coast, I imprinted on Dunkin Donuts. Once a month we would stop at DD on the way home and buy a shoebox of doughnuts. Toasted coconut and butternut, those were my favorites. Ironically, Dunkin Donuts is really a coffee shop disguised as a doughnut shop. (Doughnuts account for only 20% of their sales; coffee 50...

Answer to exercise: Pointer to member function cast

February 10th, 2004

Yesterday's exercise asked you to predict and explain the codegen for the following fragment: Well, the codegen might go something like this: Let's use one of our fancy pictures: Just for fun, I swapped the order of Base1 and Base2. There is no requirement in the standard about the order in which storage is allocated for base classes...

Orkut's privacy policy and terms of service

February 10th, 2004

It was bound to happen sooner or later. I was invited to join Orkut. But before clicking Submit, I always read the fine print: their Terms of Service and their Privacy Policy. (Oh great, you have to have scripting enabled just to read their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy!) Notice, for example, the terms for changes to their terms of ...

I think this counts as having come full circle

February 9th, 2004

First, ABBA rises to stardom in their native Sweden with Ring, Ring. They then win the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo, which is also recorded in English, French, German, and probably Spanish. Twenty-five years later, the English-language musical Mamma-Mia premieres in London and subsequently spreads through large portions of the world ...

Pointers to member functions are very strange animals

February 9th, 2004

Pointers to member functions are very strange animals. Warning: The discussion that follows is specific to the way pointers to member functions are implemented by the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler. Other compilers may do things differently. Well, okay, if you only use single inheritance, then pointers to member functions are just a ...

Adjustor thunks

February 6th, 2004

Yesterday we learned about the layout of COM objects and I hinted at "adjustor thunks". If you find yourself debugging in disassembly, you'll sometimes find strange little functions called "adjustor thunks". Let's take another look at the object we laid out last time: In the diagram, p is the pointer returned when the IPersist interface...