The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
2010 mid-year link clearance
Another round of the semi-annual link clearance. And, as always, the obligatory plug for my column in TechNet Magazine: Starting in June 2010, TechNet Magazine publishes each issue in two stages, and my column appears in the second half of the month, so don't freak out when you don't see it when a new issue first comes out.
Management fallacy: If I send people email, then they will work harder
A project many years ago neared the conclusion of one of its project milestones. Things were getting down to the wire, and upper management was concerned that the project may not reach the milestone on schedule. To ensure success, they decided to send email. From: Senior Manager Subject: READ NOW!!!! More than one bug Please see the attached spreadsheet. If you are on the To: line you can look at the Assigned To: column and find your name. You are in this spreadsheet if you have 2 or more bugs assigned to you. At this stage of the project as we are winding down and entering Milestone Z, people with a ...
The illusory repair powers of black electrical tape
Back in the crazy dot-com boom days, I knew someone who was into high-performance automobiles. And since these were the crazy dot-com boom days, he had the money to satisfy his urge to drive high-performance automobiles. He bought a used Ferrari, but found that it spent more time in the repair shop than on the road. To solve this problem, he bought a second Ferrari. (Note: This is not a solution available to most people.) One of the many trips to the auto repair shop was to address an indicator light on the dashboard which had lit up. The mechanics studied the problem and concluded that the indicator light was a...
Redneck Scrabble: It's fun unless you had to do it for real
In response to my story about creative-spelling Scrabble, some people volunteered their own personal variations, like Plausible Scrabble or Rude Word Scrabble. One variation my friends and I sometimes play is Redneck Scrabble. All words must be spelled the way a redneck might spell it. We enjoy playing it, except for my schoolteacher friend for whom it brought back horrible memories of her training, when she was assigned to assist in teaching elementary school in a rural part of the country. This Web site has some other variations. I haven't played Any Language Scrabble, but one of my college friends did; t...
How do I get a radio button control to render its text transparently?
Commenter Andrei asks via the Suggestion Box for help with making the text transparent using . "Instead of the radio button now there's a black background." Let's look at this problem in stages. First, let's ignore the transparent part and figure out how to render text without a black background. The background color of the text comes from the color you selected into the DC when handling the message. And if you forget to set a background color, then you get whatever color is lying around in the DC, which might very well be black. Start with the scratch program and make these changes, which I'm going to writ...
6-4, 3-6, 6-7 (7-9), 7-6 (7-3), 70-68: The scoreboard doesn't even go that high
The match went so long that it exceeded the limits of the scoreboard! Deadspin pulls some choice quotes out of Xan Brooks's descent into madness live-blogging the marathon Wimbledon match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut. Just read it. You can follow him as he loses his grip on reality before your very eyes. It's just a shame somebody had to lose.
My life as a square (pixel)
The evolving shape of the pixel.
When setting expectations, you also have to deny them when necessary
Occasionally the shell team will get a request from a customer via their customer liaison that requests information on how to accomplish something or other, and before we'll answer the question, we want to know what the support boundaries are. For example, we might provide a mechanism that works on Windows Vista but comes with no guarantees that it'll work in the future. (This sort of one-off solution might be appropriate for, say, a corporate deployment, where the company controls all the computers in their organization and therefore controls what version of Windows runs on each of them.) The customer liais...
The best way to prove somebody incompetent is to make up stuff and then point out that it's idiotic
One way to show that somebody is incompetent is to tell them that something they're doing is stupid, even when it's not what they're doing. Take for example this comment saying that it's stupid for copy and paste to use data objects which can allow code to execute. Um, we were talking about drag and drop, not copy and paste. And in fact, the copy and paste functionality of console windows hasn't changed. You can still copy and paste with impunity. Second example: "And yet, the feature I really want is never implemented: Rearranging the taskbar." Except it isn't true. Windows 7 implemented it. Third examp...