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Robert Scoble's embarrassment over forgetting to pay a restaurant bill reminds me of an even more embarrassing incident experienced by a component team from the Windows 95 team. To celebrate something or other, their team went to lunch at The Salish Lodge, a fine dining establishment. At the end of the meal, everybody thought somebody else...

Let's see if I can get this straight. First, Chris Pirillo says (timecode 37:59) he's not entirely pleased with the word "podcast" in Episode 11 of This Week in Tech. The Seattle-PI then reports that the sentiment is shared with "several Microsoft employees" who have coined the word "blogcast" to replace it. Next, c|net picks up the story and ...

A few years ago, I told a story of how Marketing messed up a bunch of PDC slides by "helpfully" expanding acronyms... into the wrong phrases. Today I got to see Marketing's handiwork again, as they edited my talk description. (Oh, and psst, Marketing folks, you might want to link to the full list of PDC sessions from your Conference Tracks and S...

I was introduced to the glory that is the world of Mr. Bunny many years ago. Mr. Bunny's Guide to ActiveX is probably the best book on ActiveX programming ever written. If you haven't figured it out by now, it's a humor book, but it's the sort of madcap insane geek humor that has enough truth in it to make you laugh more. My favorite is the fi...

Occasionally, I see someone ask a question like the following. I have the handle to a dialog window. How can I get the original dialog resource ID that the dialog was created from? As we saw in our in-depth discussion of how dialogs are created from dialog templates, the dialog template itself is not saved anywhere. The purpose of a template ...

Why can't all the registry key needed by Windows Setup be precomputed and splorted at one go? One reason is that Windows Setup can be customized via a so-called "unattend file", which means that a lot of the work cannot be precalculated. Some settings also have cascade effects on other settings. Also, the model for component registration is to ma...

If you go browsing around MSDN, you'll find that code samples tend to call explicitly rather than using "" notation. Why is that? To make it clearer for people who are used to other programming languages. Like it or not, a significant percentage of people who write programs for Windows do it in languages other than C and C++. Although those dev...

Jeremy Mazner has asked me to put together a 400-level session at this year's PDC. I came up with the title "Five(ish) things every Win32 developer should know (but likely doesn't)". Of course, now I have to think of five things! Here are some ideas I've been kicking around. Would you go to a talk that covered these topics? If not, what topic...

Let's see, Google Maps adds the world outside the United States, Canada and the UK, and people go ga-ga. Nevermind that Google's new "maps" have nothing beyond country boundaries. "Aww, look at Google, she's so cute and adorable!" I'm sure the people at the existing online map services like MapQuest and MSN MapPoint are sitting there like older...

Some people have noticed that NTFS automatically sorts filenames, but does so in a manner different from Explorer. Why is that? For illustration purposes, I created files with the following names: And here's the sort order for various scenarios, at least on my machine. (You'll later see why it's important whose machine you test on.) First, not...