The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
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...
How do I customize the Favorite Links section of the File Open dialog?
In the standard File Open dialog in Windows Vista and Windows 7, the top of the navigation bar contains a section called Favorite Links (on Windows Vista) or just Favorites (on Windows 7). These items also appear in the Explorer window's Navigation Pane. How do I customize those links? You add or remove them from your Links folder. To open your Links folder on Windows Vista, open the Start menu and click on your name. This opens an Explorer window to view your user profile. Double-click the folder called Links. On Windows; 7, it's much easier: Right-click the word Favorites and sel...
Wow, a task bar, what a novel idea
Some of my colleagues were struck by a sentence in this old Newsweek article about Microsoft's advertising campaign from last year. The sentence wasn't about the ad campaign, though. It was about Windows 7: The user interface has a slick new feature, a "taskbar" at the bottom that shows what apps you have open. The new system is due out later this year. Wow, Windows 7 has a "taskbar". If only we had thought of that sooner.
Bug Bash: It's funny because it's true
Hans Bjordahl's Bug Bash is one of those it's funny because it's true comics about life inside a software company. Specifically, Microsoft, where Hans worked for many years and whose internal newsletter featured Hans's strip. (Some might argue that Bug Bash was the only part of the company newsletter worth reading.) Today I'm going to share two of my favorites. Bonus discovery, Hans revealed himself as the co-founder of Mr. Cranky. Man, I loved that site.
As random as I wanna be: Why cmd.exe's %RANDOM% isn't so random
Somebody on my team reported that a particular script in our project's build process would fail with bizarre output maybe once in fifty tries. This script was run from a , and the result was a failed build. Rerunning make fixed the problem, but that's not much consolation when the build lab encounters it approximately every other day. The strange thing about the bizarre output was that it appeared to contain a mix of two different runs. How could the output of two runs be mixed into one output file? The script was a batch file, and it generated its output in a few different steps, storing the intermediate outp...
I always do a double-take when I see the name Andrew Bynum
I always think, "Does he have teammates Andrew Byref and Andrew Byval?"
Why can't AppLocale just be added to the Compatibility property sheet page?
Commenter DoesNotMatter wants to know why AppLocale cannot just be added to the Compatibility property sheet as a dropdown option. One of the things about having a huge topic backlog is that if I just wait long enough, there's a good chance somebody else will answer it, and then I don't have to write anything. And more often than not, that somebody else is Michael Kaplan, who addressed this question in April 2010: Not only is AppLocale not installed by default, AppLocale does everything in its power to remind you that you shouldn't be using it! AppLocale is the emergency compact spare tire that you pull out ...