The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Woe unto PROGMAN.INI
Sad but true: Once you document a file format, it becomes a de facto API. The Windows 95 team learned this the hard way when they set out to replace Program Manager with Explorer. Not only were the settings in the file documented, so too was the binary file format of files. The binary file format was included for diagnostic purposes: If you have a corrupted file, you can use the binary file format documentation to try to recover what you can out of it. But many people treated this documentation not as a FYI, but as a backdoor API. Instead of using the formal DDE interface for creating program groups and...
Welcome to the 11th annual Mid-Atlantic Road-E-O
The top sanitation truck drivers in the mid-Atlantic area converged on Pen Arygl, Pennsylvania for the regional finals of the SWANA Trash Collectors Road-E-O. And the results have been posted [pdf]. Only A Game's Ron Schachter reports [mp3]. (Despite the wackiness, the competition does highlight skills that all truck drivers need to master in order to complete their rounds.) And there's plenty of beeping.
The wheels of government bureaucracy turn slowly: Green cards
When foreign nationals come to work at Microsoft, the legal department gets to work with the paperwork of applying for permanent residency (colloquially known as a green card even though the cards haven't been green for a long time). Obtaining permanent resident status in the United States takes a ridiculous amount of time, and I remember the irony when one of my colleagues finally received his green card... on his last day working at Microsoft. Still, at least it arrived in time, if only barely. :: Wendy :: received her green card two months after she left the country.
Walt Mosspuppet: The return of the fake blog
Fake Steve Jobs put on the map the wonderful insanity of the fake celebrity blog. (I'm sure there were others before Fake Steve Jobs, but that's the one that made it cool and hip.) Copycats sprung up, from Fake Steve Ballmer to Mock Mark Cuban, but none of them really had the staying power of good old Fake Steve Jobs. (movie trailer voice) Until now. Introducing Walt Mosspuppet, a fake video blog starring a puppet version of the technology reporter. I love this guy.
One way to make sure nobody sends you feedback
Last year, somebody sent out a message to very large group of people describing a change to, well, what it described isn't important to the story. What's important is that the message ended with the following sentence: If you have questions, please send them to abcdef. If you don't see why this was a brilliant move, go back and check what that "abcdef" link really does. One of my cynical colleagues noted, "Maybe this was intentional. That way, when they get no feedback, they can say, 'See, this was an awesome decision. Nobody complained!'"
And they don't take American Express
A conversation between two friends of mine. Friend 1: Here's the fifteen dollars I owe you. Oh wait, I only have a twenty. Do you have a five? Friend 2: I don't carry cash. Everybody takes credit cards. Friend 1: I don't take credit cards. In my imagination, Friend 1 would have responded to "Everybody takes credit cards" with "Well, in that case, here ya go. Put it on my credit card." (The title is a tag line from a Visa credit card advertising campaign from years past.)
Why do new controls tend to use COM instead of window messages?
Commenter David wonders why new controls tend to use COM instead of window messages. "It seems that there must have been a decision to only develop COM controls after the invention of COM." There have been plenty of Win32 controls invented after the invention of COM. In fact, the entire common controls library was developed after the invention of COM. All your old friends like the list view, tree view, and property sheets are good old Win32 controls. But it's true that the newer stuff tends to use COM. Why is that? I am not aware of any grand pronouncement on this subject. Each team makes a decision that th...
A different perspective from the first row of the symphony
On the weekend of November 10 during the 2007–2008 Seattle Symphony season, the symphony performed both Brahms piano concerti and two of his symphonies in consecutive concerts. My subscription included one of them, and I bought a separate ticket to the other one, and the seat I was given was in the very front row. You notice all sorts of things when you're in the very front row, things that elude your notice from even the second or third row. When you're that close, you're within an arm's reach of the musicians. I had to look away when the concertmaster bent over to tune the orchestra; otherwise I wo...
The great thing about naming conventions is that not everybody will follow them
The naming convention for is «facility»«severity»«name», where the facility portion (and the underscore) is omitted if the facility is or . Good luck finding anybody who follows this naming convention. Okay, fine, if you look closely you might be able to find some people who do. Actually, I guess I was a bit too pessimistic when I said nobody follows it. It seems that the majority of Windows components do follow this convention, although there are some notable exceptions. There are also some people who decided to confuse matters further by using the convention for erro...