The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Be on the alert: Mainstream and alternative medicines mixed together on the store shelves, not clearly distinguished
I was in the supermarket looking for cold medicine, and as is my wont, I like to read the fine print before choosing a product. Most of the products listed their active ingredients in the form Active Ingredient: XYZ 150mg. But there were a few that said Active Ingredient: XYZ 6X. What is this 6X? How much is 6X? Six times what? A closer look at the box reveals the word Homeopathic unobtrusively written towards the bottom of the box. The 6X notation means that the active ingredient's concentration is one part in 106, or one part in a million. Suppose the dosage is one teaspoon. That's about five...
Reflections create Xbox logo on neighbor’s roof
Marketing gone crazy.
On LockWindowUpdate: Locking the taskbar
Andy Visser posted to the Suggestion Box something that wasn't so much a suggestion as a comment, presumably to get around the fact that comments on the original item had been closed: "I've found that the start bar seems to behave like it may be using this call incorrectly. I put my start bar on the left hand side of the screen. When I try to resize the bar (dragging its edge left and right), the system tray will dynamically move icons (based on tray width), seemingly disregarding the lock. The rest of the bar waits until MouseUp to redraw." Actually, the taskbar (that's the name of the thing you're referring to...
If you return from the main thread, does the process exit?
No, but maybe yes.
How do I recover the window handle passed to ShellExecute?
A customer had the following question: I'm using the function to launch a new process and am passing the handle to my application's main window as the parameter. From the new process, I want to get information from the old process, and to do that, I need the window handle. How can I recover that window handle from the new process? You can't. That window handle is used by the function only to host any user interface operations that occur as a result of the attempt to execute the program. For example, it is the owner window used for any error dialogs. The function does not pass the window handle to the laun...
What young children do when they hear a foreign language
My young nieces live in a Chinese-speaking household, which is great for them because it means that when they grow up, they will be fluent in two languages. But it makes things a bit tricky at the beginning. The niece who is the subject of this story had just turned two at the time this story takes place, so her language skills even in Chinese are pretty rudimentary. Her language skills in English are restricted to a collection of set phrases like Excuse me!, I'm sorry!, What'you doing?, I want ice cream!, and any catch phrase from the character Dora the Explorer. (I'm also fairly sure she doesn't know what Wha...
Why did the Explore option disappear from the context menu of folders in the second column of the Start menu?
A customer noticed that when you right-click on Computer in the second column of the Start menu on Windows Vista, the first two options are Open and Explore. On the other hand, in Windows 7, the Explore option is gone, leaving just Open. The customer also noticed that in Windows Vista, the two commands had the same effect and wondered if Explore was removed because it was redundant. The response from the product team was a very simple "Yes." It's interesting when a customer notices a relatively insignificant UI change, figures out the likely reason for the change, and then asks for confirmation. ...
Windows 95: It sucks less
An unofficial team motto.
Be careful that your splash screen doesn't squander the foreground love
Commenter Erbi has a program which creates a splash screen on a background thread while the main thread initializes. "I create and then destroy this splash screen window just before creating and displaying the main window." The problem is that the main window fails to obtain foreground activation. Commenting out the code that creates the splash screen fixes the problem, but then there isn't a splash screen any more (obviously). "Is there an explanation for this behavior?" This behavior is explained by two earlier blog posts, plus a PDC talk. The first blog post came out years before this question was asked: The...