The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Aspiring to the wrong office on election day
Many years ago, the local public radio station invited the three candidates for Seattle Port Commissioner to take part in a program on the upcoming election. Each candidate was given some time to address the voters directly. Here's how it went, roughly. Candidate 1: "We need an experienced person to find solutions for our region's transportation problems while still protecting the Sound against environmental damage." Candidate 2: "We need to make the port more attractive to cruise ships by lowering fees. I assure you that the fact that I own a cruise ship company is purely coincidental." Candidate&nb...
There's going to be an awful lot more overclocking out there
Last year, I told the story of overclocking being the source of a lot of mysterious crashes and that some of those overclocked machines were overclocked at the store. These machines came from small, independent shops rather than the major manufacturers. Well it looks like that's about to change. Gateway's FX530 Desktop can be ordered overclocked by the manufacturer. Just say no to DIY overclocking and let us do it for you! We'll factory overclock your Intel® quad-core processor.4 Yep, you read that right: factory overclock, which is something that most other major PC manufacturers don't do. We live in i...
Tonya and Nancy: The Opera
No, really, it's not a joke. There really is an opera written about Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. And Only a Game is there. The work was composed as a master's thesis at Tufts University by Abigail Al-Doory and, as is the nature of said productions, it was performed exactly twice and then packed away. Abigail Al-Doory: We've got our opening scene with the first press conference since the knee-whacking. Tonya and Nancy meet for the first time. Then we go into a flashback which shows the knee-whacking. Bill Littlefield: Knee-whacking as opera. This is irresistable. Abigail Al-Doory: It's incredible to ...
On the importance of backwards compatibility for large corporations
Representatives from the IT department of a major worldwide corporation came to Redmond and took time out of their busy schedule to give a talk on how their operations are set up. I was phenomenally impressed. These people know their stuff. Definitely a world-class operation. One of the tidbits of information they shared with us is some numbers about the programs they have to support. Their operations division is responsible for 9,000 different install scripts for their employees around the world. That was not a typo. Nine thousand. This highlighted for me the fact that backwards compatibility is crucial for ...
How do I convert an HRESULT to a Win32 error code?
Everybody knows that you can use the macro to convert a Win32 error code to an , but how do you do the reverse? Let's look at the definition of : If the value is less than or equal to zero, then the macro returns the value unchanged. Otherwise, it takes the lower sixteen bits and combines them with and . How do you reverse this process? How do you write the function ? It's impossible to write that function since the mapping provided by the function is not one-to-one. I leave as an execise to draw the set-to-set mapping diagram from to . (Original diagram removed since people hate VML so much, and I...
Make sure you disable the correct window for modal UI
Some time ago, I was asked to look at two independent problems with people trying to do modal UI manually. Well, actually, when the issues were presented to me, they weren't described in quite that way. They were more along the lines of, "Something strange is happening in our UI. Can you help?" Only in the discussion of the scenarios did it become apparent that it was improper management of modal UI that was the cause. We already saw one subtlety of managing modal UI manually, namely that you have to enable and disable the windows in the correct order. That wasn't the root of the problems I was looking at, bu...
I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature
I often find myself saying, "I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature." "That feature" is something aggressively user-hostile, like forcing a shortcut into the Quick Launch bar or the Favorites menu, like automatically turning on a taskbar toolbar, like adding an icon to the notification area that conveys no useful information but merely adds to the clutter, or (my favorite) like adding an extra item to the desktop context menu that takes several seconds to initialize and gives the user the ability to change some obscure feature of their video card. Allow me to summarize the guidance: The Quick...
So that's what daddy does at work
As many people have pointed out, Hallowe'en at Microsoft is a very family-oriented affair. The parents love it because the kids are in a safe environment; the kids love it because instead of having to go from house to house, you just have to walk to the next office, and then there's a big party in the cafeteria afterwards. Though it does lead to some misconceptions on the part of the younger children, the result of extrapolation from too few data points. I remember a colleague of mine who brought his young daughter to work for Hallowe'en. A conversation with "Cathy" some days later went like this: "Hi, Cath...
Separated at birth: The Windows XP SP2 launch team
Maybe, maybe not.