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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What are these strange values returned from GWLP_WNDPROC?

December 1st, 2003
GetWindowLongPtr(hwnd, GWLP_WNDPROC) [or GetWindowLong(hwnd, GWL_WNDPROC) if you haven't yet made your code 64-bit compatible] is supposed to return the current window procedure. Why do I sometimes get wacko values? Because sometimes "you can't handle the truth". If the current window procedure is incompatible with the caller of ...

Hello Sweden, you're on fire

November 28th, 2003
(Geek talk resumes on Monday.) The longstanding tradition of Norwegians telling Swedish jokes and vice versa, was recently refueled by a border story. A Norwegian man called Sweden on his mobile phone to tell them they had a forest fire. Not only did the firefighters not know about the blaze, they didn't recognize the name of the place on ...

It's like the Swedes don't want you to learn their language

November 27th, 2003
(It's a holiday in the States today and tomorrow, so I'm not going to talk about geek stuff. That'll resume on Monday.) If you pay a visit to Deutsche Welle, the German international broadcasting service, you will find a wide array of online German learning materials, such as the daily news in slowly- and clearly-enunciated German (...

Other tricks with WM_GETDLGCODE

November 26th, 2003
The WM_GETDLCODE message lets you influence the behavior of the dialog manager. A previous entry on using WM_GETDLGCODE described the DLGC_HASSETSEL flag which controls whether edit control content is auto-selected when focus changes. I was going to write a bit about the other flags, but it turns out that Knowledge Base Article 83302 ...
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What do the letters W and L stand for in WPARAM and LPARAM?

November 25th, 2003
Once upon a time, Windows was 16-bit. Thus begins the story of where the letters came from.

A shortcut to the Run dialog

November 24th, 2003
Here's a little script that opens the Run dialog. You can save it as "Run.js" and double-click it. (new ActiveXObject("Shell.Application")).FileRun(); The advantage of this approach over various others people have come up with is that this one is actually documented. (And therefore is less likely to break in the next version of the ...

You can drag/drop to the command prompt

November 24th, 2003
The command prompt is a drop target: Dropping a file onto it inserts the filename...

Why isn't Fast User Switching enabled on domains?

November 21st, 2003
Windows XP added a new feature called Fast User Switching which lets you switch between users without having to log off. But this feature is disabled if your computer is joined to a domain. Why? There were several reasons, none of them individually insurmountable, but they added up to quite a lot of work for something IT administrators weren...

What's the deal with the System Volume Information folder?

November 20th, 2003
In the root of every drive is a folder called "System Volume Information". If your drive is NTFS, the permissions on the folder are set so not even administrators can get in there. What's the big secret? The folder contains information that casual interference could cause problems with proper system functioning. Here are some of the things...

Notepad's geek options require Word Wrap be disabled

November 19th, 2003
If you want to use the "Go To" or "Status Bar" options, you have to turn off word warp first. (Word wrap messes with line breaks...