If you haven't read it yet, check out Chris Pratley's voluminous discourse on various aspects of the history of Word. It packs more history into one entry than I do all year. And that was a sequel! You can read the first half, too. In fact, the good stuff keeps on coming. just read it all.
It's a limitation of the 80386 instruction set.
When you broadcast a message (via HWND_BROADCAST) remember that the message you broadcast must have global meaning. I discussed earlier what the various message ranges mean. Notice that only the system-defined range (0..WM_USER-1) and the registered message range (MAXINTATOM .. MAXWORD) have global meaning. The other two ranges have class-...
I was going to write about why C# doesn't have "const", but Stan Lippman already discussed this in A Question of Const, so now I don't have to. (And another example of synchronicity: After I wrote up this item and tossed it into the queue, Eric Gunnerson took up the topic as well.
Windows lets you hibernate the entire machine, but why can't it hibernate just one process? Record the state of the process and then resume it later. Because there is state in the system that is not part of the process. For example, suppose your program has taken a mutex, and then it gets process-hibernated. Oops, now that mutex is abandoned...
It all comes down to the color.
In an earlier comment, Larry Osterman described why Windows 3.0 was such a runaway success. He got a little of the timeline wrong, so I'll correct it here. Windows 2.0 did support protected mode. And it was Windows/386, which came out before Windows 3.0, which first used the new virtual-x86 mode of the 80386 processor to support pre-empti...
Sometimes you'll see somebody brag about how many words are in their spell-checking dictionary. It turns out that having too many words in a spell checker's dictionary is worse than having too few. Suppose you had a spell checker whose dictionary contained every word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then you hand it this sentence: Therf ...
Along the lines of Windows as Rorschach test, here's an example of someone attributing malicious behavior to randomness. Among the logon pictures that come with Windows XP is a martial arts kick. I remember one bug we got that went something like this: "Windows XP is racist. It put a picture of a kung fu fighter next to my name - just ...
Luna was the code name for the Windows XP "look". The designers did a lot of research (and got off to a lot of false starts, as you might expect) before they came to the design they ultimately settled upon. During the Luna studies, that people's reaction to Luna was often, "Wow this would be a great UI for X," where X was "my dad" or "my em...
