The Old New Thing

Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.

Latest posts

Sep 11, 2023
Post comments count 27
Post likes count 9

Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

Raymond Chen

The common pattern of trying to delete yourself.

Sep 8, 2023
Post comments count 3
Post likes count 4

On transferring or copying ABI pointers between smart pointers

Raymond Chen

Keep track of who owns the reference.

Sep 7, 2023
Post comments count 1
Post likes count 1

A freestanding JavaScript function that uses this is easily mistaken for a constructor

Raymond Chen

Because that's what constructors look like.

Sep 6, 2023
Post comments count 2
Post likes count 2

Detecting whether a tree-like data structure contains a cycle

Raymond Chen

Combining two things we already know.

Sep 5, 2023
Post comments count 2
Post likes count 1

When documentation cautions that something may not happen, that suggests that it normally does happen

Raymond Chen

Reading between the lines.

Sep 4, 2023
Post comments count 9
Post likes count 3

Just for fun: What happens when you shift a register by more than the register size?

Raymond Chen

A comparative study of processor architectures.

Sep 1, 2023
Post comments count 0
Post likes count 1

How do I find out more about the fail-fast exception that occurs when an exception in a PPL task goes unobserved?

Raymond Chen

Digging into the internals.

Aug 31, 2023
Post comments count 0
Post likes count 3

Diagnosing a crash when trying to call ReadFile via language interop

Raymond Chen

Checking the signatures and inferring what could have gone wrong.

Aug 30, 2023
Post comments count 2
Post likes count 5

How can I programmatically obtain the value of the “Make text bigger” slider?

Raymond Chen

The text scale factor property.