The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Stick to the normal candy and nobody gets hurt
Hallowe'en is a family affair at Microsoft. It typically starts at around 3 or 4 o'clock, with costumed kids roaming the hallways collecting treats from offices. One year, one of my colleagues decided that the kids deserved more than the usual candy bars and chocolates. Even though he is Caucasian, he went to the local Asian foods market and stocked up on all sorts of Asian candies. Lychee-flavored gelatin, rice crackers, spiced watermelon seeds, you name it. It's a holiday and a cultural learning experience. He dumped all the candies into a big bowl and set them out for the kids. The kids didn't quite know w...
Working with ambiguous and invalid points in time in managed code
Public Service Announcement: Daylight Saving Time ends in most parts of the United States this weekend. I pointed out some time ago that Win32 and .NET deal with daylight saving time differently. Specifically, Win32 always deals with the time zone you are currently in (even if it's not the time zone that corresponds to the timestamp you are manipulating), whereas .NET deals with the time zone that was in effect at the time the timestamp was generated. For more details on the latter, I refer you to Josh Free from the BCL Team Blog, who some time ago explained how to work with ambiguous and invalid points i...
Dude, the admission bracelet goes around your wrist
Short stories from the 2008 PDC: Bonus chatter added 9am:
If you’re going to reformat source code, please don’t do anything else at the same time
I spend a good amount of my time doing source code archaeology, and one thing that really muddles the historical record is people who start with a small source code change which turns into large-scale source code reformatting. I don't care how you format your source code. It's your source code. And your team might decide to change styles at some point. For example, your original style guide may have been designed for the classic version of the C language, and you want to switch to a style guide designed for C++ and its new // single-line comments. Your new style guide may choose to use spaces instead of tabs f...
PDC 2008 notes: How to get to room 406A, and other notes
Today is the day of my talk. I'm always a bit nervous before these things, because I'm never sure if what I'm going to present matches up with what people are expecting. Most people who come to my PDC talk don't know who I am, so they aren't expecting me to toss out a few catch phrases, use my psychic powers, and tell stories about how a bug in a 16-bit scanner driver written in 1993 is the reason why TCP/IP is so complicated. (That last part was a parody.) Today's notes:
Why does my Run dialog say that tasks will created with administrative privileges?
"I don't know what happened, but now when I open the Run dialog on my Windows Vista machine by typing Windows+R, there is a shield under the edit box that says This task will be created with administrative privileges. What's going on?" One my colleagues used psychic powers to solve this problem: "I imagine that you manually killed Explorer, and then you used an elevated command prompt or an elevated Task Manager to launch a new one. An elevated Explorer shows this message. To fix it, exit your elevated Explorer, and exit your running elevated copy of Task Manager (if any). Then type Ctrl+Alt+Esc to launch a nor...
Typo patrol at the 2008 PDC
Typo patrol got off to a very quick start. One of the flyers in the attendee goodie bag is from a company which offers two free months of service to PDC attendees. The first step in obtaining the service is "Just signup and mention the PDC by January 31, 2008." Okay, just hang on while I fire up my time machine. Bonus grammar typo: signup is a noun; sign up is a verb. The second typo is kind of important. In all the PDC documents (including the voucher to pick up your attendee goodie bag), it says to go to Kentia Hall. This is incorrect. If you try, you'll find a locked door. The goodie bags (and all oth...
To climb the corporate ladder you’ll need some rope, but rope has many purposes
When KC told me about a trick she learned to get an area expert to respond to her email, I cautioned her that the trick might backfire: A friend of mine (let's call him Bob) happens also to work in the technology industry, and the manager for the part of the project he worked on was, to put it nicely, "in the wrong line of work." No matter how many times Bob would explain how the system worked on the whiteboard, his manager never really understood it. And the misunderstandings weren't just of the "oh I missed a little detail" variety; rather, they tended to elicit a "What planet are you from?" sort of reaction...
Ah, local Los Angeles television news, how I miss thee
Sitting in my hotel room the night before the 2008 PDC, I'm watching the Los Angeles local news, and the field reporter just said, "The police say this is an isolated incident, but it could happen anywhere."