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When you wrote code for 16-bit Windows, one of the things you spent time doing as part of performance tuning was deciding which functions should be grouped together in which segments. Code in 16-bit Windows executed out of code segments, each of which could be up to 64KB in size. When a code segment was loaded from disk, the entire segment was loa...

Some time ago, I briefly ran down how 16-bit Windows managed memory for resources. But there's a detail that I neglected to mention: Ownership. As we saw, a resource handle was really a pointer to the resource directory entry of the resource from the corresponding module. This could be done with a 16-bit pointer because the segment portion of th...

The feature now known as Aero Peek wasn't born that way. It went through several iterations before becoming what eventually shipped in Windows 7. At the MIX09 conference, Stephan Hoefnagels showed some of the precursors to Aero Peek. Here are the highlights, and the corresponding time codes if you want to jump straight to the demos. Thumbn...

I think it was a Chevy.

The magic incantation for updating the last-modified date on a file is What strange syntax! What's with the plus sign and the commas, anyway? The formal syntax is the much more straightforward This means to start with the file , then append the files , , and , treating them all as binary files. If you omit the part, then you get Thi...

High as the sky.

The nickname doesn't get used much at all any more, but back in the day, the Windows source code trunk was called the Blue Line. Where did it get that name? From the color of the whiteboard pen. When the branching structure was worked out, the trunk was drawn with a blue pen. If you were in that meeting, and you wanted to raise a point about th...

Commenter BAA says that the -lett part of Marlett comes from the designer Virginia Howlett. BAA adds, "I forget the 'Mar' but I believe it was a co-creator." If so, then that co-creator was Suzan Marashi, if Vincent Connare is to be trusted. On page 17 of the PDF document From The Dark Side..., Connare identifies the authors of the font as Virgi...

Many years ago, I visited the office of a colleague who worked on Internet Explorer in order to work on some problem or other. As we investigated the issue, we took notes on a 5"×7" tear-off notepad which bore the logo Forms³. My colleague then pointed out to me that we were taking notes on the most expensive notepads in Microsoft hist...

Project code names are not arrived at by teams of focus groups who carefully parse out every semantic and etymological nuance of the name they choose. (Though if you read the technology press, you'd believe otherwise, because it turns out that taking a code name apart syllable-by-syllable searching for meaning is a great way to fill column-inches.)...