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When you create an up-down control (some people call a "spinner" control) in its default configuration, the up-arrow decrements the value and the down-arrow increments it. Most people expect the up-arrow to increment and the down-arrow to decrement. Why is it backwards? The up-down control is a victim of Windows' reversed y-axis. Mathematical...

One of the long-standing traditions at Microsoft is to play a prank on someone's office while they're away on vacation. You can imagine what most of these pranks are like, filling someone's office with packing peanuts or other materials, or relocating their office to an unlikely part of the building (the bathroom, the cafeteria), or something more ...

Windows Vista will not have support for really old DVD drives. (The information below was kindly provided to me by the optical storage driver team.) When PC DVD drives first came out in 1998, the drives themselves did not have support for region codes but instead relied on (and in fact the DVD specification required) the operating system to ...

On our team, we have a mailing list where people can report problems. Those people could be testers from our team or they could be people from elsewhere in the company. Everybody on the team is expected to keep an eye on the messages and debug problems in their area. The job of monitoring the mailing list to ensure that every issue is ultimately ad...

A few months ago, I messed up a cross-component check-in and broke the build. I'm not proud of it. (In my excitement over finally having passed a few weeks' worth of testing requirements, I absently submitted only one of the components for check-in! My change was 99% within one component, and I forgot about the other 1%.) My submission cleared the ...

The project leader for the initial version of Internet Explorer was well-known for wearing Hawaiian shirts. I'm told that the team managers decided to take one of those shirts and use it as an award to the team member who fixed the most bugs or some similar thing. What the team managers failed to take into account that nobody actually liked having ...

In the very early days of Windows 95, the distribution servers were not particularly powerful. The load of having the entire team installing the most recent build when it came out put undue strain on the server. The solution (until better hardware could be obtained) was to have a stack of floppy disks in the office of the "build shepherd". (Th...

A little-known quirk is that the file system accepts and ignores a drive letter in front of a UNC path. For example, if you have a directory called \\server\share\directory, you can say dir P:\\server\share\directory and the directory will be listed to the screen. The leading P: is ignored. Why is that? Rewind to 1984 and the upcoming relea...

The special values and have similar names but do completely different things when passed as the parameter to the function (or its moral equivalents such as ). As a backgrounder, you should start off by reading the MSDN discussion, which is perfectly accurate as far as it goes. Here, I'll discuss the issue from a historical perspective in the h...

Windows 95 contained some new networking features, and since I was one of those crazy people who sampled every flavor of dogfood in the store, I actually tried out all of them. One of the features, a network protocol, I thought was interesting enough that I decided to help them out by forcing everybody else on the team to dogfood it. Here's...