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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A warning to people averse to code

November 10th, 2003

This is going to be a code-heavy week. People who are averse to code may want to just lie low until next week. I'll try to make it up by having next week be more storytelling-focused...

Returning values from a dialog procedure

November 7th, 2003

For some reason, the way values are returned from a dialog procedure confuses people, so I'm going to try to explain it a different way. The trick with dialog box procedures is realizing that they actually need to return two pieces of information: Was the message ...

Little facts you didn't know about concrete

November 6th, 2003

Concrete is stronger once it has hardened. Thanks, Associated Press! I learn something new every day...

Why are companies so worried about retraining costs?

November 6th, 2003

Remember, most people do not view the computer as a world to be explored. It is merely a means to an end. So they learn the five steps they need to follow, and if they can't do them, they get stuck. "I hit Alt+Tab like I always do, to switch to another program, but instead of switching, this strange window...

An anecdote about improper capitalization

November 5th, 2003

I've already discussed some of the strange consequences of case-sensitive comparisons. Joe Beda mentioned the Internet Explorer capitalization bug that transformed somebody's name into a dead body. Allow me to elaborate. You might learn something. This bug occurred ...

Just follow the rules and nobody gets hurt

November 4th, 2003

You may have been lazy and not bothered calling VirtualProtect(PAGE_EXECUTE) when you generated some code on the fly. You got away with it because the i386 processor page protections do not have a "read but don't execute" mode, so anything you could read you could also execute. Until...

The long and sad story of the Shell Folders key

November 3rd, 2003

When you are attempting to architect an operating system, backwards compatibility is one of the ones you just have to accept. But when new programs rely on app hacks designed for old programs, that makes you want to scream. Once upon a time, in what seems like a galaxy far far away (a Windows 95 beta release known as "M3"), we documented a...

Why highlighting by inverting colors is a bad idea

October 31st, 2003

Often people will say, "Oh, we can highlight by inverting the color." This may have worked great on two-color black-and-white displays, but in the world of 32-bit color this no longer is effective. Consider the following picture. See if you can guess which one is inverted...

I thought you said people don't know how to read analog clocks

October 30th, 2003

I had mentioned in passing in a comment on 10/10/2003 10:07PM that one of the reasons the clock on the taskbar isn't analog is that some disturbingly high percentage of people (30%? 40%? I forget exactly) do not know how to read an analog clock. Yet there is is in the Longhorn sidebar. ...

Drawing an active-looking caption even when not active

October 29th, 2003

"Why would somebody ever want to do that?" you might ask. Well, this is a common appearance for floating toolbars. (But aside from that case, I can't think of any other valid reason to draw a window as active even though it isn't.) Fortunately this is easy to do. Just add this line to the WndProc...