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Although Windows is centered around, well, windows, a window itself is not a cheap object. What's more, the tight memory constraints of systems of 1985 forced various design decisions. Let's take for example the design of the list box control. In a modern design, you might design the list box control as accepting a list of child windows, each of w...

In beta versions of Windows XP, there was special code in the window manager to give every window a link in the upper right corner called "Comments?" which if clicked on displayed a dialog that allowed you to submit feedback to Microsoft about that window. Since this was a beta release, there was no anonymity when you submitted feedback. (You...

We discussed a few months ago the issue of where windows minimized to before the taskbar was invented. In the modern taskbar world, why do minimized windows have an apparent size of 160x31? The size isn't just apparent. That's really their size. You can see them, for example, if you fire up a program that uses the Multiple Document Interface. ...

Once you invent a new flag you can start using it to fix errors of the past without breaking backwards compatibility. One of the errors of the past was that property sheet page dimensions were taken relative to the "MS Sans Serif" font, even if the page used some other font. This sample dialog template says that it is 212dlu wide and 188dlu t...

You may have noticed that the numerical value of the flag is equal to . Surely that isn't a coincidence. The value of the flag was chosen so that older operating systems (Windows 95, 98, NT 4) would accept the flag while nevertheless ignoring it. This allowed people to write a single program that got the "Windows 2000" look w...

Earlier, Eric Lippert discussed one scenario where breadth-first searching is better than depth-first searching. Today, I'll tell you about another. If you go back to the old MS-DOS file enumeration functions, you'll find that there is a "Find first file" function and a "Find next file" function, but no "Find close" function. That's because the ...

During the development of Windows 95, as with the development of any project, the people working on the project write side programs to test the features they are adding or to prototype a feature. After Windows 95 shipped, some of those programs were collected into the first edition of the Windows 95 Power Toys. As I recall, the fir...

To avoid breaking persistence formats.

I remember a bug report that came on in an old MS-DOS program (from a company that is still in business so don't ask me to identify them) that attempted to open the file "". That's the file with no name. This returned error 2 (file not found). But the program didn't check the error code and though that 2 was the file handle. It then began writi...

The old MS-DOS function calls (ah, int 21h), typically indicated error by returning with carry set and putting the error code in the AX register. These error codes will look awfully familiar today: They are the same error codes that Windows uses. All the small-valued error codes like ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND go back to MS-DOS (and possibly even furth...