The Old New Thing

Other - The Old New Thing

Does Windows have a limit of 2000 threads per process?

July 29, 2005 Jul 29, 2005 07/29/05
Raymond Chen
Often I see people asking why they can't create more than around 2000 threads in a process. The reason is not that there is any particular limit inherent in Windows. Rather, the programmer failed to take into account the amount of address space each thread uses. A thread consists of some memory in kernel mode (kernel stacks and object ...

On paying for your meal upon leaving a restaurant

July 25, 2005 Jul 25, 2005 07/25/05
Raymond Chen
Robert Scoble's embarrassment over forgetting to pay a restaurant bill reminds me of an even more embarrassing incident experienced by a component team from the Windows 95 team. To celebrate something or other, their team went to lunch at The Salish Lodge, a fine dining establishment. At the end of the meal, everybody thought somebody...

Watching the game of “Telephone” play out on the Internet

July 18, 2005 Jul 18, 2005 07/18/05
Raymond Chen
Let's see if I can get this straight. First, Chris Pirillo says (timecode 37:59) he's not entirely pleased with the word "podcast" in Episode 11 of This Week in Tech. The Seattle-PI then reports that the sentiment is shared with "several Microsoft employees" who have coined the word "blogcast" to replace it. Next, c|net picks up the story...

When Marketing edits your PDC talk description

July 14, 2005 Jul 14, 2005 07/14/05
Raymond Chen
A few years ago, I told a story of how Marketing messed up a bunch of PDC slides by "helpfully" expanding acronyms... into the wrong phrases. Today I got to see Marketing's handiwork again, as they edited my talk description. (Oh, and psst, Marketing folks, you might want to link to the full list of PDC sessions from your Conference Tracks ...

The best book on ActiveX programming ever written

July 8, 2005 Jul 8, 2005 07/8/05
Raymond Chen
I was introduced to the glory that is the world of Mr. Bunny many years ago. Mr. Bunny's Guide to ActiveX is probably the best book on ActiveX programming ever written. If you haven't figured it out by now, it's a humor book, but it's the sort of madcap insane geek humor that has enough truth in it to make you laugh more. My favorite is ...

How can I recover the dialog resource ID from a dialog window handle?

July 8, 2005 Jul 8, 2005 07/8/05
Raymond Chen
Occasionally, I see someone ask a question like the following. I have the handle to a dialog window. How can I get the original dialog resource ID that the dialog was created from? As we saw in our in-depth discussion of how dialogs are created from dialog templates, the dialog template itself is not saved anywhere. The purpose of a ...

Why isn't Windows Setup just a disk reimage plus a registry dump?

June 29, 2005 Jun 29, 2005 06/29/05
Raymond Chen
Why can't all the registry key needed by Windows Setup be precomputed and splorted at one go? One reason is that Windows Setup can be customized via a so-called "unattend file", which means that a lot of the work cannot be precalculated. Some settings also have cascade effects on other settings. Also, the model for component registration is ...

Why do Microsoft code samples tend to use ZeroMemory instead of { 0 }?

June 28, 2005 Jun 28, 2005 06/28/05
Raymond Chen
If you go browsing around MSDN, you'll find that code samples tend to call explicitly rather than using "" notation. Why is that? To make it clearer for people who are used to other programming languages. Like it or not, a significant percentage of people who write programs for Windows do it in languages other than C and C++. Although ...

I'll see (some of) you in Los Angeles in September

June 22, 2005 Jun 22, 2005 06/22/05
Raymond Chen
Jeremy Mazner has asked me to put together a 400-level session at this year's PDC. I came up with the title "Five(ish) things every Win32 developer should know (but likely doesn't)". Of course, now I have to think of five things! Here are some ideas I've been kicking around. Would you go to a talk that covered these topics? If not, what ...