The Old New Thing

Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.

Latest posts

Sep 8, 2026
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A sample use of the winstart.bat file in Windows 95

Raymond Chen

For a driver that needs high resolution mode only in Windows.

Sep 7, 2026
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Why don’t we allow stacks to be sparse, instead of forcing them to be contiguous?

Raymond Chen

Imagining how to report a memory allocation failure for a sparse page.

Sep 4, 2026
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What happens if you change a window class’s GCL_CB­WND­EXTRA?

Raymond Chen

You're changing the value for future windows.

Sep 3, 2026
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The case of the progress callback that never got called when progress happened

Raymond Chen

Are you talking to the right guy?

Sep 2, 2026
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The perils of binding to value types in XAML

Raymond Chen

Loss of identity.

Sep 1, 2026
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Microspeak: Funded / unfunded

Raymond Chen

People are our most valuable asset.

Aug 31, 2026
Post comments count 11
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AWE does not require PAE, though PAE makes it much more useful

Raymond Chen

All dressed up with nowhere to go.

Aug 28, 2026
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On forcing all derived classes to implement a specific non-virtual method, part 2

Raymond Chen

Explicitly denying that you implement the method.

Aug 27, 2026
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On forcing all derived classes to implement a specific non-virtual method, part 1

Raymond Chen

Don't implement a stub. Just don't implement it at all.