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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Why can't I use &-accelerators on the Start menu?

October 3rd, 2003
The first letter of the program is the accelerator and there's nothing you can do about it. So if you have ten programs by Microsoft, they all use the accelerator "M". (Yes I hate this too. The first thing I do after installing a Microsoft program is go into the Start menu and delete the word "Microsoft" ...

What do the text label colors mean for files?

October 2nd, 2003
Blue means compressed; green means encrypted. This is an example of one of those "come on, it's a tiny, simple feature" requests. Yes, the code to do this isn't particularly complicated, but it adds another element of "Ha ha, I'm going to do something in a way that you will never be able to ...

Why does my Advanced Options dialog say ON and OFF after every option?

October 2nd, 2003
Because Windows thinks a screenreader is running. If a screenreader is running, then the Advanced Options dialog will add "ON" and "OFF" to the end of each checkbox item so the screenreader program can read the state to a blind user...

Jag skrivar svenska inte so bra.

October 1st, 2003
The nice thing about the schwa sound is that you don't have to spell it. Many thanks to C-J Berg for fixing my Swedish spelling errors. I probably introduced some new ones here, though. But why Swedish? Well, it wasn't Swedish initially. Many years ago, I saw an ad ...

Jag taler lita svenska.

October 1st, 2003
Attended my first formal Swedish lesson last night. It's great to recapture the simultaneous thrill and frustration of trying to have a conversation in a language you don't really know. It's a small class - Swedish isn't exactly one of the "big-name" languages out there. I always feel ...

Why do I get spurious WM_MOUSEMOVE messages?

October 1st, 2003
In order to understand this properly, it helps to know where WM_MOUSEMOVE messages come from. When the hardware mouse reports an interrupt, indicating that the physical mouse has moved, Windows determines which thread should receive the mouse move message and sets a flag on that thread's...
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Why is the readonly property for folders so strange?

September 30th, 2003
It's actually a signal to Explorer to look harder.

In case people got the wrong impression

September 29th, 2003
I really did enjoy my trip. I just like talking about the goofy things. I intend to go back to Sweden in the spring. I'm currently enrolled in Swedish lessons but this trip came far too soon for me to have learned anything useful aside from "tack", "ursäkta" and "Jag taler inte svenska." ...

Why you can’t rotate text

September 29th, 2003
Answering a comment from an earlier entry.

Back from Europe

September 29th, 2003
Here are some things I learned in Sweden, Germany and Denmark...

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