The Old New Thing

Norway works to lengthen its lead

Norway locks its grip on "Best place to live" status: As I pointed out last month, this then leads to... Shoulda studied Norwegian like I had planned to do originally before I got sidetracked by Swedish...

What is the difference between HINSTANCE and HMODULE?

They mean the same thing today, but at one time they were quite different. It all comes from 16-bit Windows. In those days, a "module" represented a file on disk that had been loaded into memory, and the module "handle" was a handle to a data structure that described the parts of the file, where they come from, and where they had been loaded...

A hidden performance cost of regional windows

Regional windows are neat, but they come at a cost. Most of the cost you can see directly. For example, constantly changing the region clearly generates a cost since you have to sit there and generate new regions all the time. One question that came up on an internal performance alias highlights one of the hidden costs of regional windows: ...

Speeding up adding items to a combobox or listbox

Just a little tip: If you're going to be adding a lot of items to a listbox or combobox, there are a few little things you can do to improve the performance significantly. (Note: The improvements work only if you have a lot of items, like hundreds. Of course, the usability of a listbox with a hundred items is questionable, but I'm assuming ...

What are these directories called 0409 and 1033?

A reader asked, I was wondering why it's common for some Microsoft products to have a directory called "1033" within it's program directory installation location? What does it mean? This reader was probably from the United States, because 1033 is the locale identifier for "English (United States)", whose hexadecimal value is 0x0409...

Let there be a grand clubhouse feast!

Kenny Mayne is one of the regular anchors for ESPN SportsCenter and for some reason I find this particular home run call hilarious: I am king of the diamond! Let there be a grand clubhouse feast! [WAV] Bring me the finest meats and cheeses throughout the land! — From The SportsCenter Altar multimedia download center. Here...

When can a thread receive window messages?

Everybody who has messed with window messaging knows that GetMessage and PeekMessage retrieve queued messages, which are dispatched to windows via DispatchMessage. Most people also know that GetMessage and PeekMessage will also dispatch nonqueued messages. (All pending nonqueued messages are dispatched, then the first queued message is ...