Hey folks, this blog is moving to a new home. It'll take me a while to set up shop there, though, so please be patient. Some time after the new year, the content will likely migrate to the new location.
Hey there, everybody. It's going to take me a while to settle in, so please be patient. It seems I always celebrate a new blog by designing some insane multi-part series on some obscure aspect of Win32, so I think I'll welcome this site with a series of articles that demonstrate various things you can do with the shell namespace. I haven't planned ...
This is the (future) new home of The Old New Thing. Just kicking the tires right now.
Martyn Lovell from the VC++ team has joined the world of blogging. Martyn is a smart guy, even though he does spell some words funny.
If a framework exposes functionality provided by a lower layer, how hard should the framework try to insulate you from all the quirks and limitations of the lower layer? Instinctively, of course, you would say, "The framework should insulate me completely." But be careful what you ask for. If a frame...
This is going to be a code-heavy week. People who are averse to code may want to just lie low until next week. I'll try to make it up by having next week be more storytelling-focused.
Remember, most people do not view the computer as a world to be explored. It is merely a means to an end. So they learn the five steps they need to follow, and if they can't do them, they get stuck. "I hit Alt+Tab like I always do, to switch to another program, but instead of switching, this strange window show...
I've already discussed some of the strange consequences of case-sensitive comparisons. Joe Beda mentioned the Internet Explorer capitalization bug that transformed somebody's name into a dead body. Allow me to elaborate. You might learn something. This bug occurred because ...
Slashdot is in an uproar over a lawsuit charging computer manufacturers for misleading consumers over hard drive capacity. The manufacturers use the ISO definition, wherein a "gigabyte" is one billion bytes, even though most people consider a gigabyte to be 1024 megabytes. This is a tricky one. The computer industry is itself inconsistent as to...
One thing I am known for at Microsoft is my frequent use of bad analogies. Everybody else at work has had to suffer; now it's your turn. Why are there so many copies of svchost.exe running? What is svchost.exe anyway? Traditionally, each service runs in its own process. When you are develo...
