The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Raymond's subjective, biased, unfair, and completely wrong characterization of the sounds of several East Asian (and one Southeast Asian) languages
Hokkien: This is the language I learned first, so to me it sounds perfectly normal and is in fact how languages should sound. I find it odd that people describe it as one of the more difficult languages to learn. I mean, sure it has a large tone repertoire (eight theoretical, though only seven in practice) and extensive tone sandhi, but that's what makes it beautiful and smooth. And what's so hard about having unvoiced aspirated consonants, unvoiced unaspirated consonants, and voiced consonants? Mandarin: Mandarin is the German of East Asian languages: It is harsh and unforgiving. There are only four formal ton...
When a program is launched via DDE, and there are multiple servers, which one is used?
Although you are more than welcome to stop using DDE (please oh please stop using it), there are still many applications which still use it (cough), and as a result, customers still have questions about it. One customer wanted to know why, if multiple copies of a DDE-based application are running, Windows 7 will send the command to the earliest-launched copy of the program, whereas Windows XP will send the command to the most-recently-used copy. "Our employees were used to forcing the document to open in a specific window by switching to that window, thereby making it most-recently-used, then switchin...
SubtractRect doesn't always give you the exact difference
The function takes a source rectangle and subtracts out the portion which intersects a second rectangle, returning the result in a third rectangle. But wait a second, the result of subtracting one rectangle from another need not be another rectangle. It might be an L-shape, or it might be a rectangle with a rectangular hole. How does this map back to a rectangle? The documentation for says that the function performs the subtraction when they "intersect completely in either the x- or y-direction." But I prefer to think of it as the alternate formulation offered in the documentation: "In other words, the resul...
Facilities jargon: Energize
Over in the product engineering groups, we aren't often exposed to the jargon employed by our Facilities group. But once in a while, it leaks through and then we get to puzzle it out. Emergency Electrical Outage and Restoral Due to a transformer failure, power to building NNN was shut down from 6:00am to 6:30am on MMMM-DD. Occupants may need to re-energize their office equipment. From what we can gather, re-energize is just a fancy way of saying turn on. Bonus jargon: Restoral.
Entering the world of competitive Ring-Around-the-Rosie
I dreamed that a friend and I were in line at some sort of summer camp to get into the cafeteria. We noticed a glass cabinet with food out in the dining area and asked about it. Turns out that it was available for people to eat, as an alternative to standing in line. We decided to go for it. (Another example of how being lucky is observing what you weren't expecting.) The plates on top of the cabinet were nearly empty, but it never occurred to anybody to open the cabinet door to get the food inside. We opened the door and moved food to the top of the cabinet, as a crowd slowly formed as people noticed, "Hey, lo...
Forcing a file handle closed when it has been opened remotely
Today's Little Program closes a file handle that was opened remotely. It builds on previous discussion on how to use the functions. Forcing a network file handle closed does not actually close the handle. This makes it very different from the various "force handle closed" utilities out there. Rather, forcing a network file handle closed is accomplished by simulating a network failure, so that when the remote machine tries to use the handle again, it's told, "Wha? I'm sorry, we must have a bad connection, because I'm not sure what you're talking about." Since programs which access network resources must dea...
How does InterlockedIncrement work internally?
The Interlocked family of functions perform atomic operations on memory. How do they do it? It depends on the underlying CPU architecture. For some CPUs, it's easy: The x86, for example, has direct support for many interlocked operations by means of the prefix (with the bonus feature that is implied for the opcode.) The ia64 and x64 also have direct support for atomic load-modify-store operations. Most other architectures break the operation into two parts, known as Load-link/store-conditional. The first part (load-link) reads a value from memory and instructions the processor to monitor the memory add...
It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway: Creating problematic files in a directory that requires administrative access
You have to get there first.
Why does Internet Explorer put tab stops at 8-character intervals instead of 4, like all right-thinking people?
When you embed a TAB character (U+0009) in a <PRE> block (or more precisely, an element whose CSS property is computed to be or ), Internet Explorer will move the current position to the next multiple of eight characters. Many people prefer four. (Some insist that only four is the correct value and anybody who disagrees with them is simply wrong.) Why eight? Because that's what the standard says. All tabs (U+0009) are rendered as a horizontal shift that lines up the start edge of the next glyph with the next tab stop. Tab stops occur at points that are multiples of 8 times the width of a space (U+0020...