Showing tag results for History

Dec 17, 2009
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What was the ShowCursor function intended to be used for?

Raymond Chen

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...

History
Dec 7, 2009
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What is the story behind multimon.h?

Raymond Chen

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. ...

History
Nov 30, 2009
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Where did WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN come from?

Raymond Chen

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...

History
Nov 17, 2009
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We found the author of Notepad, sorry you didn't go to the award ceremony

Raymond Chen

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...

History
Nov 16, 2009
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Why does shlwapi import a nonexistent function?

Raymond Chen

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...

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Nov 12, 2009
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Why can you create a PIF file that points to something that isn't an MS-DOS program?

Raymond Chen

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...

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Nov 2, 2009
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Hey, is there somebody around to accept this award?

Raymond Chen

Back in the late 1990s, some large Internet association conducted a survey in order to bestow awards in categories like Best Web server and Best Web browser, and one of the categories was Best Web authoring tool. We didn't find out about this until the organization contacted the Windows team and said, "Hi, we would like to present Microsoft with t...

History