The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
The perils of translating words blindly without verifying them in context
My fancy new office phone has an option to change the language of its user interface, so naturally I chose Swedish. Once I did that, I saw some obvious translation errors. The first example above is just sloppiness, but the second one illustrates how a simple LocalizeString("some text") algorithm doesn't work. As Lance Fisher's teacher put it, "Russian is not a translation of English." You can't just take words and phrases in one language and put them through a simple mapping table and expect the result to be accurate. Back in the Windows 95 days, the German translation team needed some beta testers, an...
Another celebrity knitter: Tracey Ullman
Tracey Ullman joins the roster of celebrity knitters with her book Knit 2 Together: Patterns and Stories for Serious Knitting Fun. (She also gets to add to the pile of books whose titles are of the form Catchy title: Long boring subtitle.)
The most important choice in writing is not what you say, it’s what you don’t say
"The most important choice in writing is not what you say. It's what you don't say." Eric Gunnerson gave me that advice when I was writing my book. It's sort of the writing version of "You don't know what you do until you know what you don't do." That's why I'll write Of course, you probably wonder this magical comes from. It comes from the Multilanguage Object in mlang. and not The variable we've been using is an interface pointer to the interface. We obtain this pointer by calling the function, asking for the object whose class ID is (defined in the header file) and specifying the interface...
Where did WiX get its name?
For the story of how WiX got its name, I defer to its author, Rob Mensching.
Don't assume the first person to run your program is an administrator
One "optimization" I've seen from some programs is to defer a bunch of system configuration work to the first time the program is run or the first time a feature is requested instead of doing it at install time. The problem with this is that the first person to run your program is not guaranteed to be an administrator. For example, there is one popular media program that doesn't install its CD AutoPlay handler until you run it for the first time. If the first person to run the program is not an administrator, then their AutoPlay handler doesn't get installed and consequently never works. This problem became mor...
Suggestion Box 3, short answers (part 1 of who knows how many)
Some suggestion box topics turn into daily entries. Others deserve just a sentence or two. Here are the short answers. Can you shed some light on RPC_E_CANTCALLOUT_ININPUTSYNCCALL? This one is kind of bizarre, because the person who asked the question linked to the answer! What form do application hacks usually take in Windows? They take many forms, depending on the situation, but checking a window caption is definitely ill-advised, since that creates the opportunity both for false positives (what if an unrelated program happens to have the same caption?) and fal...
2007 Q3 link clearance: Microsoft blogger edition
A few random links that I've collected from other Microsoft bloggers.
2007 Museum Day, courtesy of Smithsonian Magazine
It's the end of September, which means that once again, it's time for Smithsonian Magazine's annual Museum Day, so search for a participating museum near you and get your free admission card. One of the participating museums is the Museum of History & Industry, known to locals by its initials, MOHAI. Whenever I go past the museum and see the big MOHAI banners, I think to myself how great it would be if they opened a satellite location in, say, Renton. That museum would be called the Museum of History & Industry, Renton, or MOHAIR for short.
Why did the shortcut template change in Windows Vista?
Since Windows 95, when you right-dragged an item and selected "Create Shortcut", you got "Shortcut to X". But in Windows Vista, the name is now "X - Shortcut". Why is that? Two reasons. The first reason is globalization. The template "Shortcut to X" made X the object of a preposition. In some languages, this may require changes to X (for case) or to the word "to" (based on grammatical properties of X). Constructing sentences from phrases is a dangerous endeavor due to language issues like this, and the new formulation sidesteps the issue by not trying to make a phrase out of the result....