The Old New Thing

Scrollbars part 9 – Maintaining the metaphor

September 9, 2003 Sep 9, 2003 09/9/03
Raymond Chen
When a document is displayed with scrollbars, the metaphor is that the window is a viewport onto the entire document, only a portion of which is visible at the moment. The default behavior of a resize, however, is to maintain the origin at the upper left corner of the client area, which breaks the metaphor...

An insight into the Windows 95 startup sound

September 8, 2003 Sep 8, 2003 09/8/03
Raymond Chen
Doo, dudududingggggg.... ding.... ding... ding... In an interview with Joel Selvin at the San Francisco Chronicle, Brian Eno explains. Q: How did you come to compose "The Microsoft Sound"? A: The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. ...

Where is my program running from?

September 5, 2003 Sep 5, 2003 09/5/03
Raymond Chen
Another common question: "How do I find out where my program is? I want to be able to access support files in that same directory." Answer: GetModuleFileName(NULL...

Case mapping on Unicode is hard

September 5, 2003 Sep 5, 2003 09/5/03
Raymond Chen
Occasionally, I'm asked, "I have to identify strings that are identical, case-insensitively.  How do I do it?" The answer is, "Well, it depends. Whose case-mapping rules do you want to use?" Sometimes the reply is, "I want this to be language-independent." Now ...

The World Adult Kickball Association

September 2, 2003 Sep 2, 2003 09/2/03
Raymond Chen
"People just want to come out and have fun," Smith said. "A lot of the sports leagues out there, unless you're die-hard, unless you're so serious, people end up getting left out," he said. Not so with kickball. "People haven't done it since grade school, so it's not like people ...