Raymond Chen, Author at The Old New Thing

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Don't let Marketing mess with your slides

October 17th, 2003

It's PDC season, so I thought I'd relate an anecdote about a conference from many years ago. I forget which conference it was, maybe GCDC 1996, we were all busy preparing our presentations and submitted them to the Microsoft conference representatives so they could apply the standard ...

Scrollbars redux: Part 12

October 16th, 2003

Reader Jeff Miller added Word-style scroll tips to our sample scrollbar program. Here's how he did it: A tracking tooltip is used to display the scroll tip because we don't want the tooltip to do automatic positioning or automatic show/hide. When a tracking scroll occurs (...

The much-misunderstood "nop" action

October 16th, 2003

Last month, the printers were reconfigured in our building and we got an announcement that went like this: Subject: Printer/Copier Reconfiguration Microsoft Digital Campus Program Action Required blah blah blah printers are being reconfigured blah blah blah...

Murphy's law for school

October 15th, 2003

If you know the answer to every question but one, the teacher will call on you to answer that one. I'm learning this rule all over again...

What about BOZOSLIVEHERE and TABTHETEXTOUTFORWIMPS?

October 15th, 2003

More strange function names.

Why don't notification icons get a message when the user clicks the "X" button?

October 14th, 2003

If such a notification were generated, ill-behaved programs would just react to a click on the balloon's "X" button with an annoying follow-up dialog like, "Are you sure you want to ignore my wonderful message?" So there was a conscious decision not to give them the chance. In the Before...

Answer to previous exercise about the mythical WM_MOUSEENTER message

October 14th, 2003

If the program starts with the mouse already in the client area without moving, why do you get a beep?

Why is there no WM_MOUSEENTER message?

October 13th, 2003

There is a WM_MOUSELEAVE message. Why isn't there a WM_MOUSEENTER message? Because you can easily figure that out for yourself. When you receive a WM_MOUSELEAVE message, set a flag that says, "The mouse is outside the window." When you receive a WM_MOUSEMOVE message and the flag...

Why doesn't the clock in the taskbar display seconds?

October 10th, 2003

Early beta versions of the taskbar clock did display seconds, and it even blinked the colon like some clocks do. But we had to remove it. Why? Because that blinking colon and the constantly-updating time were killing our benchmark numbers. On machines with ...

Other uses for bitmap brushes

October 9th, 2003

Bitmap brushes used to be these little 8x8 monochrome patterns that you could use for hatching and maybe little houndstooth patterns if you were really crazy. But you can do better. CreatePatternBrush lets you pass in any old bitmap - even a huge one, and it will create a brush from it. ...