The Old New Thing

If the Euro 2004 tournament were a video game

October 25, 2004 Oct 25, 2004 10/25/04

Raymond Chen

If the Euro 2004 tournament were a video game, it might have looked like this. View recreations of the tournament highlights, and since the graphics are computer-generated, you can select among multiple camera angles, embody a specific player, or see what it's like to be the ball itself! (Via MetaFilter.) [Raymond is currently on ...

Why doesn’t Setup asks you if you want to keep newer versions of OS files?

October 22, 2004 Oct 22, 2004 10/22/04

Raymond Chen

Windows 95 Setup would notice that a file it was installing was older than the file already on the machine and would ask you whether you wanted to keep the existing (newer) file or to overwrite it with the older version. Asking the user this question at all turned out to have been a bad idea. It's one of those dialogs that ask the user...

Let WMI do the heavy lifting of determining system information

October 21, 2004 Oct 21, 2004 10/21/04

Raymond Chen

Windows Management Instrumentation is a scriptable interface to configuration information. This saves you the trouble of having to figure it out yourself. For example, here's a little program that enumerates all the CPUs in your system and prints some basic information about them. var locator = WScript.CreateObject("WbemScripting....

How does Explorer detect whether your program supports long file names?

October 20, 2004 Oct 20, 2004 10/20/04

Raymond Chen

When you register your program with a file association, the shell needs to decide whether your program supports long file names so it can decide whether to pass you the long name (which may contains spaces! so make sure you put quotation marks around the "%1" in your registration) or the short name. The rule is simple: The shell looks at ...

The compatibility constraints of even your internal bookkeeping

October 19, 2004 Oct 19, 2004 10/19/04

Raymond Chen

The Listview control when placed in report mode has a child header control which it uses to display column header titles. This header control is the property of the listview, but the listview is kind enough to let you retrieve the handle to that header control. And some programs abuse that kindness. It so happens that the original ...

Implementing higher-order clicks

October 18, 2004 Oct 18, 2004 10/18/04

Raymond Chen

Another question people ask is "How do I do triple-click or higher?" Once you see the algorithm for double-clicks, extending it to higher order clicks should be fairly natural. The first thing you probably should do is to remove the CS_DBLCLKS style from your class because you want to do multiple-click management manually. Next, you can ...

Logical consequences of the way Windows converts single-clicks into double-clicks

October 15, 2004 Oct 15, 2004 10/15/04

Raymond Chen

First, I'm going to refer you to the MSDN documentation on mouse clicks, since that's the starting point. I'm going to assume that you know the mechanics of how single-clicks are converted to double-clicks. Okay, now that you've read it, let's talk about some logical consequences of that article and what it means for the way you design ...

Little facts you didn’t know about volcanoes

October 14, 2004 Oct 14, 2004 10/14/04

Raymond Chen

Molten rock makes volcano glow red, reports CNN. Amazing the things you can learn from the news. Last year we learned that concrete is stronger once it has hardened...

The procedure entry point SHCreateThreadRef could not be located…

October 14, 2004 Oct 14, 2004 10/14/04

Raymond Chen

Some people smarter than me have been working on this problem, and here's what they figured out. First, I'll just reprint their analysis (so that people with the problem and are searching for the solution can find it), and then we can discuss it. Update (18 October 2005): The official version of this document is now available. Please use ...

Dispatching items collected from the suggestion box

October 13, 2004 Oct 13, 2004 10/13/04

Raymond Chen

Okay, I got around to digging through the suggestion box, and today I'm going to dispatch the items that don't require much thought but seemed worthy of reply to some degree. You won't learn much of anything today. Other entries require more thought. Each non-code entry takes me a half hour or so, more if I have to do research (if ...