Actual feedback submitted to the microsoft.com web site many years ago. id: 13726 Date: 1996-07-29 17:27:41.997 Name: *********** Email: ************* Area: Windows 95 Comments: PLEASE read this entire email as it is quite serious. I just discovered today that in the Windows 95 operating system, there are no switches, command line opti...
A relic from the days before multi-threading...
Reader Ben Hutchings wanted to know why the 8-bit codepage is called "ANSI" when it isn't actually ANSI. But instead of saying, "Oh well, some things mortals were never meant to know," he went and dug up the answer himself. A quick Google for Windows ANSI misnomer found me exactly what I was looking for [pdf]: "The term "ANS...
Calc and Notepad changed. Did you notice?
Larry Osterman picks up the history ball and describes how those FILE_SHARE_* values came to be.
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...
