The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
There is no complete list of all notifications balloon tips in Windows
A customer wanted a complete list of all notifications balloon tips in Windows. There is no such list. Each component is responsible for its own balloon tips and is not required to submit their list of balloon tips to any central authority for cataloging. In order to create such a list, somebody would have to go contact every component team and ask them for a list of all their balloon tips, and that component team would probably undertake a search of their code base looking for balloon tips. And figuring out the text of each balloon tip can be tricky since the text may be built dynamically. (And the customer did...
The gradual erosion of the car trip experience, part 2
When I learned that my nieces were heading out on a road trip, I asked, "Are you going to sing songs?" My eldest niece looked at me as if I were from Mars, then replied, "No, we bring electronics."
Microspeak: bar check
A bar check sounds like the sort of thing you receive at the end of a long evening of drinking, but that's not what a bar check is. Among the things that happen at ship room meetings is reviewing each bug that has a proposed fix and deciding whether to accept or reject the fix. Another thing that happens at ship room meetings is the bar check: The person representing the bug describes the issue and what is known about it so far and asks for a preliminary assessment from the ship room as to whether this is the sort of bug they would approve if a fix were available, in other words, whether it meets the bug bar....
The geeky thrill of discovering that two things are really the same thing, just with different labels
Today's post about binomial coefficients was intended to be a warm-up for Catalan numbers, but it turns out Eric Lippert already covered them, first in the context of binary trees, then in the context of arbitrary trees and forests, and then again in the context of matched parentheses. Another way of seeing the correspondence between forests and matched parentheses is simply to consider each as an XML open-tag and each as an XML end-tag. One thing to take away from the enumeration of objects controlled by Catalan numbers is that when you see multiplication in a recurrence relation, that typically correspo...
Enumerating subsets with binomial coefficients
Inspired by the Little Program which enumerates set partitions, I decided to do the binomial coefficients this week. In other words, today's Little Program generates all subsets of size k from a set of size n. As before, the key is to interpret a recurrence combinatorially. In general, when a recurrence is of the form A + B, it means that at the recursive step, you should do A, followed by B. In our case, the recurrence is C(n, k) = C(n − 1, k) + C(n − 1, k − 1). The combinatorial interpretation of the recurrence is to look at how you can go from a set of size n to a set of size n − 1 ...
Windows is not a Microsoft Visual C/C++ Run-Time delivery channel
There's a DLL in the system directory called , and from its name, you might think that it is the Microsoft Visual C/C++ Run-Time library. That is a perfectly reasonable guess. But it would also be wrong. The Microsoft Visual C/C++ Run-Time libraries go by names like or or or , and the debugging versions have a in there, too. And like MFC, these binaries might be on your machine as a side effect of the implementation of a particular Windows component, but they are not contractual. If your program requires the Visual C/C++ Run-Time library, then your program needs to install the appropriate version. (Ther...
Why does PrintWindow hate CS_PARENTDC? redux
Why does hate ? Because everybody hates ! Commenter kero claims that it's "easy to fix" the problem with and . You just remove the style temporarily, then do the normal , then restore the style. The question is then why simply doesn't do this. The question assumes that the described workaround actually works. It may work in limited situations, but it certainly doesn't work in general. Since the style is a class style, removing the style affects all windows of that class, not merely the window you are trying to print. Suppose there are two windows of the class running on different threads, and you remov...
What happens to my COM server-side object when clients die unexpectedly?
They get cleaned up eventually.
Why is Rundll32 called Rundll32 and not just Rundll?
There is an oft-abused program named . Why does its name end in ? Why not just call it ? (I will for the moment ignore the rude behavior of calling people stupid under the guise of asking a question.) Because there needed to be a way to distinguish the 16-bit version from the 32-bit version. Windows 95 had both (the 16-bit version) and (the 32-bit version). Of course, with the gradual death of support for 16-bit Windows, the 16-bit is now just a footnote in history, leaving just the 32-bit version. But why did the two have to have different names? Why not just use the same name () for both, putting t...