The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Why do operating system files still adhere to the old 8.3 naming convention?
Commenter Brian Reiter asks a duplicate of a question that was already submitted to the Suggestion Box: Darren asks why operating system† files still (for the most part) adhere to the old 8.3 naming convention. There are a few reasons I can think of. I'm not saying that these are the reasons; I'm just brainstorming. First, of course, the name of a DLL cannot change once it has been chosen, because that would break programs which linked to that DLL by its old name. Windows 95 did not require the system volume and user profile volume to support long file names, although that was certainly the cas...
What do the colors in the elevation dialog mean?
On Windows Vista with User Account Control enabled, when you right-click a program and select Run as Administrator, the elevation prompt contains a particular snippet of warning text and a corresponding color-coding. Here are what the four colors mean. You can learn about the philosophy behind UAC in this Channel9 interview. Pre-emptive snarky comment: "UAC sucks!" The purpose of this entry is not to discuss whether UAC is a good idea or not. I'm just trying to help by providing information on what the colors mean. This is one of the entries that I was afraid to write. On its own, it's useful information, b...
On the effect of dandruff on climate
The Improbable Research blog alerted me to a news report on the effect of dandruff and other cellular material on climate (full report).
How to talk like Marketing: The awareness space
The great thing about Marketing is that you get to use words and phrases that normal human beings never use. Here's an example from over a decade ago: XYZ fit the installed base of web browsers we were targeting, and worked well in an awareness space. I have no idea what an "awareness space" is. The punch line? This sentence came from a person whose title was "Director of Communication"!
The buffer size parameter to GetFileVersionInfo is the size of your buffer, no really
The function takes a pointer to a buffer () and a size (), and that size is the size of the buffer, in bytes. No really, that's what it is. The application compatibility folks found one popular game which wasn't quite sure what that parameter meant. The programmers must have thought it meant "The size of the version resources you want to load" and called it like this (paraphrased): "Gosh, the function wants to know how big the version info is, so we need to call to find out!" they must have thought. This code worked great... for a while. It was checking the file version of the video driver. (My gues...
The social skills of a thermonuclear device, part 4
Last summer, one of my colleagues thought it would be fun to have an informal "lunch chat with Raymond" as a special treat for our summer interns. One of the interns reacted to the invitation a bit unexpectedly, asking meekly, "Is he going to yell at us?"
Why are there both TBSTYLE_EX_VERTICAL and CCS_VERT?
There are two ways to make a vertical toolbar. You can use the common style, or you can use the extended style which is specific to the toolbar. Why are there two ways of doing the same thing? Because we messed up. Whoever created the extended style didn't realize that there was already a perfectly good way of specifying a vertical toolbar (namely, ). What's worse, some vertical behavior is controlled by and some by . So if you want a vertical toolbar, you probably want to set both styles to cover all your bases on Windows XP. Unfortunately, the story doesn't get any better. Once this mistake was dis...
The publicity machine continues: A chat with Scott Hanselman and Hanselminutes
Scott Hanselman let me know he was going to be in town, and after some negotiation with the company PR department (who probably get the massive heebie-jeebies from this whole blog thing), I was able to accept his invitation to appear on his weekly podcast, HanselMinutes. We sat down for a little chat, and a few weeks later, I became Show #56. I haven't had the nerve to listen to it myself. I hope I came off okay. In other self-promotion news (did I mention yet that I wrote a book?), it looks like I will be in Palo Alto on April 21 for a family event, and I'll likely spend the 20th visiting Microsoft's Sili...