The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
First, try reading the error message: Episode 1
Quite some time ago, a customer had forgotten that they were using an evaluation edition of Windows, and they were awakened one morning with the following error message: The evaluation period for this installation of Windows has expired. This system will shut down in 1 hour. To restore access to this installation of Windows, please upgrade this installation using a licensed distribution of this product. The customer submitted an urgent request for assistance. "Please advise how we can get this machine working again. We need it to run a demo for a major client later this week." In the customer's panic, th...
Signs that your new building was originally designed for another purpose: Rest rooms
There's always a settling-in period when you move offices, learning where things are, like the rest room, the kitchen, the printer room, the cafeteria, the locker room, your boss... My new office is conveniently close to the rest room. Actually, this building is laid out kind of weird. There are two sets of rest rooms within a short distance of each other, on opposite sides of a stairwell. You can wave hello from one to the other and have a conversation. My office is nearly halfway between them. But I can use only one of them. On the south side, there are two rest rooms, a men's room and a women's room. On t...
Just letting you know I had to reboot my telephone
Shortly after my group got switched over to new fancy-dancy IP phones, one of my colleagues sent me email to say "This morning, when I picked up the phone, I kept getting a 'URL not allowed' error. I fixed it by rebooting my phone." So this is what the world has come to. Bonus chatter: As many readers surmised, these "new" IP phones arrived over a year ago. On the other hand, I never did get to learn all the features of the device before it was replaced with a different model of IP phone. Progress.
How do I know whether a window message was processed?
Commenter Skeets Norquist asks how to tell whether the original window procedure processed a message when you use to call the original window procedure. "CallWindowProc() always seems to return an LRESULT of 0." No, actually, returns whatever the window procedure did. If the window procedure returned zero, then returns zero. If the window procedure returned 5, then returns 5. Anyway, back to the original question. You actually know the answer, if you think about it the right way, and there are many right ways of thinking about it. Technique number 1: Reading the contract from the other side. ...
Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines is online and downloadable
Get it before it's obsolete. The Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines document is available in PDF format.
Imagine our luck when we found one of the fancy conference rooms available for our meeting
Some time ago, the group I was a member of was looking for a conference room in which to hold their weekly team status meeting. The group leader went to the so you want to book a conference room for your weekly meeting internal Web site and, hey wow, there was a slot available in one of the fancy conference rooms for Tuesdays at ten in the morning. Not all conference rooms are created equal. Most of them are pretty utilitarian in nature with a central table, standard-issue chairs, a speaker phone, a whiteboard against one wall, all the stuff you need for a meeting but nothing particularly noteworthy. But in thi...
Parents billed when kids miss school: Pay for play
The Scotts Valley school system is asking parents to compensate the district when they take their kids out of school to go on vacation. Adds a new wrinkle to the phrase "pay for play". I remember the days when we were taught the difference between the things you must do (obligations, responsibilities) and the things you want to do.
Creating shortcuts in the same folder as the target isn’t as stupid as you may think
Commenter Mihai wonders, "Why would I want to keep the original file and the link in the same folder?" Dragging a file, and in particular right-dragging a file, is not easy for all people. There are people with poor dexterity who have trouble with dragging; for them, right-dragging would be even worse. But even people with normal levels of dexterity have problems with dragging: Just put them in front of a Tablet PC. On a Tablet PC dragging with the fingertip can get tricky because your hand obscures the drag target, and most people don't have very pointy fingers, so the precision of the drop is prett...
People become more trustworthy the more you trust them
My faith in humanity goes up when I see an unattended self-service stand where customers are trusted to pay for what they take. It works because the system is open to public view, and any passer-by (or even just a poster of a pair of eyes) can spot the cheater. (Then again, it takes only a tiny percentage of cheaters to ruin it for everyone.) I remember reading a story on self-checkout devices which said that product theft actually went down after the devices were installed. Apparently the customers were more trustworthy than the employees when it came to retail theft. People will rise to the occasion and...