Why can't all the registry key needed by Windows Setup be precomputed and splorted at one go? One reason is that Windows Setup can be customized via a so-called "unattend file", which means that a lot of the work cannot be precalculated. Some settings also have cascade effects on other settings. Also, the model for component registration is to ma...

Francesco ("Ces") Marciuliano is the author of the comic strip Sally Forth. In his blog, Drink at Work he expounds on whatever tickles his fancy. (Warning: Includes strong language, adult situations, and political views.) Sure, the stories on writing a cartoon are fun, especially when he responds to feedback from readers, and he also has a lon...

If you go browsing around MSDN, you'll find that code samples tend to call explicitly rather than using "" notation. Why is that? To make it clearer for people who are used to other programming languages. Like it or not, a significant percentage of people who write programs for Windows do it in languages other than C and C++. Although those dev...

Many Windows information mechanisms are based on message broadcasts, among them DDE, WM_FONTCHANGE, and changes in system settings. Why do these mechanisms use broadcasts, when we know that broadcasts can result in the system grinding to a halt due to windows that have stopped processing messages? Because in 16-bit Windows, you didn't have this...

If the window isn't visible on the screen, then the pixels simply don't exist. The Windows painting model follows the principle of "Don't save anything you can recalculate". Consider: You have a 640x480 display in 16-color mode. That's 150KB of video memory. Take four copies of Notepad and maximize each one. If each of those copies of Notepad req...

Programs that weren't designed to handle long file names would make mistakes like taking the path to the executable and writing it into the registry, unaware that the path might contain a space that needs quoting. (Spaces—while technically legal—were extremely rare in SFN paths.) The CreateProcess function had to decide whether to "auto...

Jeremy Mazner has asked me to put together a 400-level session at this year's PDC. I came up with the title "Five(ish) things every Win32 developer should know (but likely doesn't)". Of course, now I have to think of five things! Here are some ideas I've been kicking around. Would you go to a talk that covered these topics? If not, what topic...

In an earlier comment, Aswin Gunawan asked why the Run dialog does autocorrection but not the Run key? One is a programmatic interface and the other is an end-user control. End users are not expected to be understand how computers do things. They want, and even expect, the computer to help them out with what they're typing. This means spell-chec...

Let's see, Google Maps adds the world outside the United States, Canada and the UK, and people go ga-ga. Nevermind that Google's new "maps" have nothing beyond country boundaries. "Aww, look at Google, she's so cute and adorable!" I'm sure the people at the existing online map services like MapQuest and MSN MapPoint are sitting there like older...

Although many people use the Date/Time control panel to flip through a calendar, that's not what it is for. In fact, if you use it that way, you can create all sorts of havoc! In its original incarnation in Windows 95, the Date/Time control panel changed your date and time. If you clicked through the calendar to see next month, you actually ...