Showing tag results for History

Gabe wanted to know the nature of the feedback that resulted in the change to Explorer navigation pane. Historically, Explorer had a navigation pane that contained a folder tree, and the navigation pane could be toggled on and off. From observations and usability studies, we observed that users in general found this toggling burdensome. People li...

Mike Dunn was curious about the intended purpose of . The style adds a row below the header control consisting of an edit control and a funnel icon. The funnel icon presumably represents a coffee filter, because after all, everybody in the world drinks coffee as much as people in Seattle. (Developers think they're so clever.) Mike points out t...

Miral wondered why the function draws at the default icon size instead of respecting the actual icon size. After all, if you loaded a nonstandard-sized icon via , then presumably you want to use that nonstandard size. The question is one of those types of questions that fails to understand history, like asking why NASA didn't send the space shut...

Unintentional consequences.

Global or local.

You may have noticed a minor inconsistency between pinning a program to the Start menu and pinning a destination to a program's Jump List. Although pinned items appear at the top of the respective lists, and both the Start menu and Jump List let you right-click an item and select Pin/Unpin, the Jump List also lets you pin and unpin an item by click...

Chris asked for some stories about what Explorer was like in the early days. Well, one thing is that the original name of Explorer was Cabinet, continuing the folder/document metaphor by taking all your folders and documents and putting them inside a virtual filing cabinet. (Cabinet was viewed as an update to the Windows 3.1 File Manager pro...

Carlos wonders why the Windows 95 shell was prototyped as 16-bit code running on the still-under-development 32-bit kernel, USER, and GDI as opposed to being prototyped as fully 32-bit code on Windows NT. There were a number of reasons, some good, some bad. One reason was that the Windows 95 shell was being developed by the Windows 95 ...

One of the continuing compatibility problems that plagued Direct3D was the way it reported texture formats. Historically, the way an application checked which texture formats were available was by calling and passing a callback function which is called once for each supported format. The application's callback made some sort of decision based on t...

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. ...