The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Hiding from the police? Try knitting a sweater
Well, okay, it didn't work. But it was an interesting technique. Police Find Hit & Run Suspect Knitting At Curbside January 29, 2003 (Miami Beach) — Several elderly patients were injured Tuesday afternoon after a car that witnesses say was traveling more than 100 mph slammed into the van in which they were riding. Police say that while the van's injured passengers and driver were trapped inside the van, the woman who was driving the car that slammed into them was sitting by the roadside knitting.
Why was GlobalWire called GlobalWire?
John Elliott wondered why the function was called . First, some background for those who never had to write 16-bit Windows programs. The function was similar to the 16-bit function, except that it had the bonus feature of relocating the memory to the lowest available linear address. You used this function as a courtesy if you intended to leave the memory locked for a long time. Moving it to the edge of the address space means that it is unlikely to become an obstacle in the middle of the address space which would otherwise prevent future large memory allocations from succeeding. But why "wire"? This e...
Take it easy on the automatic retries
When I saw a discussion of how to simulate retry via try/catch, using as inspiration a Ruby function that retried a network operation three times before finally giving up, I felt the need to caution against automatic retry. Your natural inclination when faced with a failure that has a good chance of being caused by a transient condition is to retry it a few times. The second, or possibly third, try will finally work, and your function can continue. The user gets what they want without an annoying "Abort, Retry, Cancel"-type dialog, one less support call for you. What could possibly go wrong? I've seen this ...
It’s not a book, but it’s slightly closer
TechNet Magazine has picked me up as a columnist, and in their November/December 2005 issue they granted me the great honor of being on the back page. My opening salvo is an IT-ized version of one of my more popular early articles, but future issues will contain never-before-seen random musings on subjects of interest to IT professionals. And no, I don't get paid to write that column either. You can learn more from the TechNet Magazine Blog, including how to get a free subscription.
Why is there a special PostQuitMessage function?
Why is there a special PostQuitMessage function? Because it's not really a posted message. Commenter A. Skrobov asked, "What's the difference between and ?" They are not equivalent, though they may look that way at first glance. The differences are subtle but significant. Like the , , and messages, the message is not a "real" posted message. Rather, it is one of those messages that the system generates as if it were posted, even though it wasn't. And like the other messages, the message is a "low priority" message, generated only when the message queue is otherwise empty. When a thread calls , a fl...
Look what the hurricanes blew into Lafayette, LA
NPR reports that the influx of people into Lafayette has resulted in the city experiencing in one week the growth it had projected for fifteen to twenty years. It has also revived the singles scene. "Some young women say they're finding people to date for the first time in years."
To be a leader you must know when to follow
Many people misinterpreted my use of the term "reluctant" to describe the attitude of the designers in changing the way the Date/Time control panel functions. It was a reluctance of shame, not a reluctance of defiance. Your software is there for the users, not vice versa. If you find that your users are using the software in a manner contrary to its intended purpose, your first reaction may be to try to educate users not to do whatever it is they're doing. But eventually you reach a point where the efforts in convincing people not to do something dangerous outweighs the cost of just making it less dangerous. (...
Found blog: The Piehole
I have no idea who this person is, but she's all attitude all the time. Like this entry from October 18, 2005 when Jennifer was recovering from a foot injury: Men love a girl who can't run away quickly I got "wooey!"-ed by a garbage man on my way back to the office from lunch today... Because I'm so HAWT hobbling down the street. He could not resist my hobbling! I am hobbleicious! Sssssssss! * And just so you know, being followed down the street by a garbage truck with someone screaming "YEAH BABY!" and "what's your phone number?" is TOTALLY CLASSY! * This is the sound of me sizzling! It's the aste...
Blog design as a form of reality programming
On one of our internal blogging aliases, some people were interested in ways of making their blog look spiffier, and the Max team's blog was pointed out as an example of a "pimped out blog". This in turn led to exchange of tips and tricks and someone even proposed an informal Pimp My Blog contest. What next? Extreme Blog Makeover? Trading MSN Spaces?