The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
How to take down the entire Internet with this one weird trick, according to Crisis
According to television.
Cargo-cult registry settings and the people who swear by them
Two customers (so far) wanted to know how to increase the duration of taskbar balloon notifications on Windows Vista. (By the way, I gave the answer some time ago.) They claimed that on Windows XP, they were using the registry key , setting the value to a specifying the number of seconds the balloon should appear. They wanted to know if this still worked in Vista. Heck, it didn't work even in Windows XP! That undocumented registry key actually controls whether the Windows XP taskbar should show the "To see the hidden icons, click this button" tip. It has nothing to do with how long the balloo...
Only senior executives can send email to the All Employees distribution list, but mistakes still happen
Some time ago, a senior executive sent email to the All Employees distribution list at Microsoft announcing that a particular product was now available for dogfood. The message included a brief introduction to the product and instructions on how to install it. A few hours later, a second message appeared in reply to the announcement. The second message came from a different senior executive, and it went I got your note and tried it out. Looks good so far. Oopsie. The second senior executive intended to reply just to the first senior executive, but hit the Reply All button by mistake. This would normally have...
Find the index of the smallest element in a JavaScript array
Today's Little Program isn't even a program. It's just a function. The problem statement is as follows: Given a nonempty JavaScript array of numbers, find the index of the smallest value. (If the smallest value appears more than once, then any such index is acceptable.) One solution is simply to do the operation manually, simulating how you would perform the operation with paper and pencil: You start by saying that the first element is the winner, and then you go through the rest of the elements. If the next element is smaller than the one you have, you declare that element the new provisional winner. Ano...
Why is the debugger telling me I crashed because my DLL was unloaded, when I see it loaded right here happily executing code?
A customer was puzzled by what appeared to be contradictory information coming from the debugger. We have Windows Error Reporting failures that tell us that we are executing code in our DLL which has been unloaded. Here's a sample stack: But if we ask the debugger what modules are loaded, our DLL is right there, loaded as happy as can be: In fact, we can view other threads in the process, and they are happily running code in our DLL. What's going on here? All the information you need to solve this problem is given right there in the problem report. You just have to put the pieces together. Let's ta...
Eventually, we may find out where notes eight through twelve came from
CBC Radio's Tom Allen investigates the origin of the opening four notes of the classic Star Trek theme. He traces it to the opening of Mahler's First Symphony, then further back to Brahms's Second Symphony and Beethoven's Fourth Symphony. In college, one of my classmates (the same one that is now the conductor of an orchestra) identified the source of the trumpet fanfare in the Star Trek theme, also known as notes five through seven: Mahler's Seventh Symphony. Skip to timecode 11:05. Eventually, we may find out where notes eight through twelve came from. If the trend keeps up, we may discover that it came fr...
Why does my radio button group selection get reset each time my window regains activation?
A customer reported (all incomplete information and red herrings preserved): We have an issue related to two radio buttons in a window. The code programmatically checks the second button by sending the message. We observe that if the user clicks somewhere else on the screen (so that our application loses focus), and then clicks on the taskbar icon to return to our application, the first radio button spontaneously gets selected. We watched all the messages in Spy++, and it appears that the radio button is receiving a followed by a . Is this by design? If not, what should I be looking for in my code that i...
Dialog boxes return focus to the control that had focus when you last switched away; how do I get in on that action for my own windows?
You start typing.
The code names for various subprojects within Windows 95
Most people know that Windows 95 was code-named Chicago. The subprojects of Windows 95 also had their code names, in part because code names are cool, and in part because these projects were already under way by the time somebody decided to combine them into one giant project. Even when they were separate projects, the first three teams worked closely together, so the names followed a pattern of ferocious cats. My guess is that when the user interface team chose their code name, they heard that the other guys were naming themselves after cats, so they picked a cat, too. I don't know whether they did ...