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 happens to those "To Any Soldier" care packages

March 12th, 2004
Commentator and novelist Christian Bauman recalls the excitement of receiving mail from anonymous well-wishers back home during his deployment with the U.S. Army in Somalia in the early 1990s. This was a fascinating listen. The coup, of course, was getting a letter with a snapshot or two inside. I don't know why, but the further...

Tony Harding laces up again

March 11th, 2004
The skater you love to hate is back. Tonya Harding will lace up for a single game tomorrow with the Indianapolis Ice, which coincidentally happens to be "Guaranteed Fight Night". (If there's no fight, you get a free ticket to another game.) Ah, minor-league hockey... Personally, I don't think it's right when somebody benefits ...

Why are dialog boxes initially created hidden?

March 11th, 2004
You may not have noticed it until you looked closely, but dialog boxes are actually created hidden initially, even if you specify WS_VISIBLE in the template. The reason for this is historical. Rewind back to the old days (we're talking Windows 1.0), graphics cards are slow and CPUs are slow and memory is slow. You can pick a menu ...

The Department of Homeland Security, the television series?

March 10th, 2004
I am not making this up. There's a new television show based on The Department of Homeland Security, titled D.H.S.. I guess they realized that The O.C. was a hip edgy name so they'd try it too. The audio clips I heard on the radio seemed to make the DHS sound like a non-stop adrenaline-rush guns-drawn kind of department, when my personal ...

Why do operations on "byte" result in "int"?

March 10th, 2004
(The following discussion applies equally to C/C++/C#, so I'll use C#, since I talk about it so rarely.) People complain that the following code elicits a warning: "The result of an operation on 'byte' should be another 'byte', not an 'int'," they claim. Be careful what you ask for. You might not like it. Suppose we lived in a fantasy ...

Char.IsDigit() matches more than just "0" through "9"

March 9th, 2004
Warning: .NET content ahead! Yesterday, Brad Abrams noted that Char.IsLetter() matches more than just "A" through "Z". What people might not realize is that Char.IsDigit() matches more than just "0" through "9". Valid digits are members of the following category in UnicodeCategory: DecimalDigitNumber. But what exactly is a ...

Returning to Sweden, this time with some actual knowledge of Swedish

March 9th, 2004
I will be in Stockholm from March 24th to April 7th, with an excursion to Göteborg thrown in at some point yet to be determined, probably the 29th to the 1st. So the blog will be on autopilot for a few weeks. (Assuming I can even generate that much advance material. If not, then it will just plain go quiet...

Can you pass "Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball"?

March 8th, 2004
From ESPN: If you were enrolled in Jim Harrick Jr.'s Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball course at the University of Georgia in the fall of 2001, you were drilled on such subjects as basketball, basketball and even basketball. How many points for a field goal? What league does Georgia compete in? What color are ...

C++ scoped static initialization is not thread-safe, on purpose!

March 8th, 2004
How the design of the C++ language subverts thread safety.

Defrauding the WHQL driver certification process

March 5th, 2004
In a comment to one of my earlier entries, someone mentioned a driver that bluescreened under normal conditions, but once you enabled the Driver Verifier (to try to catch the driver doing whatever bad thing it was doing), the problem went away. Another commenter bemoaned that WHQL certification didn't seem to improve the quality of ...