The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
When you set a 100% CPU program to real-time priority, you get what you asked for
Real-time priority is really dangerous. It's higher priority than nearly everything else. It's higher priority than mouse input, keyboard input, and the disk cache. If you foolishly set the priority class of a CPU-intensive program to real-time, it will suck up your entire processor, leaving no cycles for anything else. In particular, since not even input runs at real-time priority, you can't stop it via any interactive means, because the thread that manages input can't even run to process your input. Mind you, even if the input thread did run at real-time priority, that wouldn't really help you any. Sure, it...
When you use a term, it helps if you know what the term means
Some years ago (in a project far, far away) I received a piece of email from a member of the release management team asking me if a particular issue met the escrow reset bug bar or not, as it applied to an upcoming pre-RTM release. I asked, "What is the current escrow reset bar?" I thought this was a fair question. After all, in order to state whether or not the issue met the escrow reset criteria, I needed to know what the escrow reset criteria were. I figured they'd reply with something like "The escrow reset criteria are on this internal Web page. Please evaluate the issue against those criteria and get bac...
Proto-Microspeak: Bug-hugging
As they say, "piss or get off the pot."
Dum dee dum, just hanging around the European Conference on Computer Supported Co-op… OMG LOOK AT THOSE CUTE DUCKS!
The 10th European Conference on Computer Supported Co-operative Work was held in Limerick, Ireland, and as you'd expect there were a lot of speakers and breakout sessions and... oh my God, look at those cute ducks!
Is it real that you are still using Visual C++ 6 and 5?
Commenter Sys64738 points out that Bjarne Stroustrup's Web site says that "Literally everything at Microsoft is built using various flavors of Visual C++ - mostly 6.0 and 7.0 but we do have a few holdouts still using 5.0 :-(" and wonders if it's true. Well, let's see. Visual C++ 6 came out in 1998 and doesn't support the /GS flag, nor does it support various replacement functions like . This makes it hard for anything compiled with Visual C++ 6 to conform to Microsoft's Security Development Lifecycle which requires all code to be compiled with /GS and bans functions like . As a result, I would suspect that...
How do I enable and disable the minimize, maximize, and close buttons in my caption bar?
A customer was having problems with the small icon that appears in the upper left corner of the caption: In my program, I need to enable and disable the Close button programmatically, since the program sometimes goes into a state where I don't want the user to close it. I do this by removing the style when I want to disable the Close button, and adding it back when I want to re-enable it. However, doing this has as a side effect that the icon for my program doesn't appear in the title bar any more. If I never touch the style, then it works fine (but then I don't get the enable/disable behavior that I want). ...
The voice of Carl Kasell emerges from the loudspeaker as some old guy stands there and moves his mouth
Some time ago, the NPR news quiz Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me taped a show in Seattle. (They're back in town tonight.) I was fortunate to score tickets to that show, in part because I ordered them nearly a full year before taping. Watching the taping of the show is quite a treat, and I recommend it for any fan of the program. You can watch Peter Sagal pace back and forth as he talks and contrast it to old-school radio man Carl Kasell, who stands perfectly still as he delivers his lines. The strangest part of the experience was putting the face to the voice. When Carl Kasell started talking, my reaction was, "Hey...
How do I convert an ANSI string directly to UTF-8?
A customer asked the following question: Is there a way to convert an ANSI string directly to UTF-8 string? I have an ANSI string which was converted from Unicode based of the current code page. I need to convert this string to UTF-8. Currently I am converting the string from ANSI to Unicode () and then converting the Unicode to UTF-8 (). Is there a way to do the conversion without the redundant conversion back to Unicode? There is no multibyte-to-multibyte conversion function built into Windows (as of this writing). To convert from one 8-bit encoding to another, you have to use Unicode as an intermediate ...
The giant typewriter eraser in the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle
The Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle is open and free to the public all year around. (And I'm surprised they haven't gotten the heat from the IOC over use of the word Olympic.) One of the works is a giant typewriter eraser. When my friend took her niece (I'm guessing around ten years old at the time) to visit the park, the girl asked, "What's that?" — Oh, that's a typewriter eraser. Back before Wite-Out or eraser ribbons, this was how you corrected mistakes. This end is the eraser, and you use that end to brush the crumbs off. The next question was unexpected, but in retrospect, inevitable. "What's...