Showing tag results for History

Nov 28, 2011
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Why is CLIPFORMAT defined to be a WORD rather than a UINT?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Commenter Ivo wants to know if the function returns a , why is the data type defined to be a ? Since a is smaller than a , you have to stick in a cast every time you assign the result of to a . Rewind to 16-bit Windows. Back in those days, a and a were the same size, namely, 16 bits. As a result, people got lazy about the distinction. ...

History
Nov 21, 2011
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Why not use animated GIFs as a lightweight alternative to AVIs in the animation common control?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Commenter Vilx- wondered why animated GIFs weren't used as the animation format for the shell animation common control. After all, "they are even more lightweight than AVIs." Animated GIFs are certainly more lightweight than general AVIs, since AVI is just a container format, so decoding a general AVI means decoding any encoding format invented n...

History
Oct 27, 2011
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Why do the pinned items in the Jump List go on the top instead of the bottom?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

When you pin items to the Jump List, they go to the top of the menu that appears when you right-click the Taskbar item. Why not put the pinned items at the bottom? After all, over 98% of users leave the taskbar at the bottom of the screen, so putting the pinned items at the bottom of the list maintains a consistent position relative to the Taskbar...

History
Oct 14, 2011
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When your vice president tells you to stop replying to a mail thread, you probably should stop replying to the mail thread

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Some time in the early part of this century, somebody sent a message to the Windows NT Development Announcements mailing list at Microsoft. It went something like, "My car was parked in «location X» and somebody ran into it and didn't leave a note. Does anybody have any information about this?" Now, one thing you need to know is t...

History
Sep 8, 2011
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Why doesn't the Disk Management snap-in incorporate S.M.A.R.T. data?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

My article a while back on Why the Disk Management snap-in reports my volume as Healthy when the drive is dying gave the low-level explanation of why the Disk Management snap-in does not incorporate SMART information: because the Disk Management snap-in is concerned with volume partitioning. DWalker59 noted that the use of the word "Healthy" carr...

History
Sep 2, 2011
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What's the story with the parameters to the WM_INPUT_DEVICE_CHANGE message?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A customer found these strange macros in winuser.h: According to the documentation for the message, the is the operation code and the is a handle to the device that changed. Given that definition, the correct macro would be . What's up with the bogus macro? The macro was incorrectly defined in Windows Vista. In the Windows 7 ver...

History
Aug 26, 2011
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Random musings on the introduction of long file names on FAT

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Tom Keddie thinks that the format of long file names on FAT deserves an article. Fortunately, I don't have to write it; somebody else already did. So go read that article first. I'm just going to add some remarks and stories. Hi, welcome back. Coming up with the technique of setting Read-only, System, Hidden, and Volume attributes to hide LFN ...

History
Aug 5, 2011
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Menu item states are not reliable until they are shown because they aren't needed until then

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A question arrived from a customer (with the rather unhelpful subject line Question for Microsoft) wondering why, when they call and then ask for the states of the various menu items like , the menu item states don't reflect reality. The menu item states don't synchronize with reality until the user actually opens the system menu. There is no req...

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