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Commenter eric johnson wonders how that control panel keyboard autorepeat setting works. This is one of those questions that has many answers, depending on how deep you want to dig. The first layer of the question is how the control panel changes the keyboard autorepeat rate. That's simple: It uses . From the documentation, you can see that the ...

Back in the days when Windows was introduced, a mouse was a fancy newfangled gadget which not everybody had on their machine. Windows acknowledged this and supported systems without a mouse by having keyboard accelerators for everything (or at least that was the intent). But if the design stopped there, you'd have a dead cursor in the middle of yo...

Saturating the network with broadcast packets.

Commenter asdf wonders what the deal is with that header file. Let's set some context. That header file was written back in the time when Windows 98 was still under development. Windows 98 was the first version of Windows to support multiple monitors. At the time, most application authors had Windows 95 as their target platform. ...

Commenter asdf wonders where came from. The symbol was introduced in the Windows 95 time frame as a way to exclude a bunch of Windows header files when you include . You can take a look at your file to see which ones they are. The symbol was added as part of the transition from 16-bit Windows to 32-bit Windows. The 16-bit header file di...

His friends call him Bill.

I've received independent confirmations as to the authorship of Notepad, so I'm inclined to believe it. Sorry you didn't get to go to the award ceremony. The original author of Notepad also served as the development manager for Windows 95. His job was to herd the cats that made up the programmers who worked on Windows 95, a job which yo...

Commenter charless asks why shlwapi.dll imports a nonexistent function from mpr.dll, which shows up in dependency tools as a broken import. Because that function did exist at one point, although it doesn't exist any more. The function in question was available only on Windows 95-series versions of Windows. It never existed on Windows N...

James MAstros asked why it's possible to create a PIF file that refers to a program that isn't an MS-DOS program. (That's only part of the question; I addressed other parts last year.) Well, for one thing, there was indeed code to prevent you from setting PIF properties for something that isn't an MS-DOS program, so the precaution was already th...

One of the things I mentioned in my talk the other week comparing school with Microsoft is that in school, as the deadline approaches, the work becomes increasingly frantic. On the other hand, in commercial software, as the deadline approaches, the rate of change slows down, because the risk of regression outweighs the benefit of the fix. A colle...