The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Whoa there, logging on awful fast now are we?
What happens when you log on too quickly.
Crazy Eddie: His prices were insane because it was all a criminal operation
If you lived in the New York metropolitan area in the 1980's, you couldn't avoid the advertisements for electronics store Crazy Eddie. What I didn't realize until now was that the retail establishment was a criminal operation from day one. Sam Antar, Crazy Eddie CFO, and nephew of company namesake Eddie Antar, talks us through the entire operation in this riveting interview. Along the way, you'll learn why it was at first advantageous to under-report revenues, then later why it became advantageous to return the unreported money back to the system. Unexpected skill you develop as a money launderer: You can loo...
Why does the Start menu search box autoselect some items but not others?
When you open the Start menu and type into the search box, sometimes the first search result is autoselected (so you just have to hit Enter), whereas sometimes See more results is autoselected. Is there a method to this madness? If an item is found in the Programs and Control Panel sections, then the first such is autoselected. Otherwise, the default item is See more results. The theory is that if you are typing a program or control panel name from muscle memory and make a typo, you don't want this to result in a random file opening. (Why are programs and control panels treated differently? Because the list of...
A complex family calculus
I spent the other night at a relative's house, and I was woken the next morning by my young niece who politely asked me to make her breakfast. (Her technique for waking me up is to come in and call my name. If the door is closed, she pounds on the bedroom door and shouts, "Wake up! Wake up!" If I fail to open the door, she opens it herself. If the door is locked, she jiggles the handle until she forces the door open. I just leave the door open now. Making the best of a bad situation.) Anyway, later that morning, the following conversation took place between my niece and an adult family member (which conversation...
Can you create an information context for the display?
Adrian McCarthy asks, "Can you create an information context for the display? ... I can call CreateDC("DISPLAY"), but perhaps that wouldn't generalize for a multiple-monitor display with different settings on each screen. I'm trying to avoid constantly creating and destroying DCs when all I need to do is measure strings, check color depth, dpi, etc." I admire the effort of trying to avoid creating a whole DC when all you want is to perform some inquiries. Some inquiries are monitor-independent, like getting the DPI or measuring strings, so you can just use to get a temporary DC. This is cheaper than a full-on ...
Most people who go to an open house aren't actually interested in buying it
You have a house for sale. You hold an open house. But not everybody who attends is there because they're interested in buying the house. The first wave are neighbors who are curious about the house they've seen for years only from the outside. Then there are the people who just enjoy looking at other people's houses. And occasionally, people drop by looking for chicken wings.
If you're handling an out of memory exception, you probably shouldn't allocate memory
With the assistance of Application Verifier, specifically, low resource simulation (also known as fault injection), a tester found a stack overflow condition. As we learned earlier, the important thing to look at when studying a stack overflow is the repeating section. When this stack trace was shown to the development team, they instantly recognized the cause of the problem. And you also have enough information to figure it out, too. Hint: Of the most likely reasons that a method named would throw an error, which of them match the scenario? Since we are simulating low resources, the error being thrown...
Start with a $50,000 grant, hold a fundraiser, lose $47,000
Phase three: Not profit. Coolidge High School received a $50,000 grant from AOL Time Warner to help keep the school computer systems running. Add a bizarre and disastrous fundraiser run by a confessed fraudster, and the next thing you know, nearly all of the money vanished before the year was out.
Management-speak: Focus
Management likes to use the word focus. They like it so much, that anything important is called a focus. That's an interesting scenario, one which we hope to address, but it's not our main focus. We're focusing on three features for this release. But how can you focus on more than one thing? The first citation implies that there's more than one focus (a main focus, and maybe some secondary foci); the second citation makes explicit the mutiplicity of foci. But a lens doesn't focus on more than one thing. There is one focus, the point at which parallel rays from infinity converge. Then again, if a lens is de...