{"id":102743,"date":"2019-07-31T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-31T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=102743"},"modified":"2019-07-31T06:05:57","modified_gmt":"2019-07-31T13:05:57","slug":"what-about-userseeuserdo-and-gdiseegdido","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20190731-00\/?p=102743","title":{"rendered":"What about USERSEEUSERDO and GDISEEGDIDO?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In Windows 3.1, there were undocumented functions named <code>USER\u00adSEE\u00adUSER\u00adDO<\/code> and <code>GDI\u00adSEE\u00adGDI\u00adDO<\/code>. Surely there&#8217;s a story behind these funny names.<\/p>\n<p>Of course.<\/p>\n<p>These functions were used for internal testing purposes. They allowed stress tests to do things like allocate extra memory in the desktop heap in order to trigger low-memory conditions in the window manager. They also were used by the 16-bit tool helper library to do things like enumerate all the window classes that have been registered.<\/p>\n<p>The name of the <code>USER\u00adSEE\u00adUSER\u00adDO<\/code> function is evidently a play on the idiom <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Monkey_see,_monkey_do\"> <i>monkey see, monkey do<\/i><\/a>. In this case, <code>USER<\/code> is the thing being told to do various strange things, and it dutifully does them. But it&#8217;s also a joke, because the word <i>user<\/i> here could be interpreted as referring to the end user.<\/p>\n<p>The <code>GDI\u00adSEE\u00adGDI\u00adDO<\/code> function arrived later, and its name was patterned after <code>USER\u00adSEE\u00adUSER\u00adDO<\/code>. Nevermind that it&#8217;s really not much of a joke.<\/p>\n<p><b>Bonus chatter<\/b>: Some of the random things that <code>USER\u00adSEE\u00adUSER\u00adDO<\/code> and <code>GDI\u00adSEE\u00adGDI\u00adDO<\/code> did have been formalized in the <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/en-us\/windows\/desktop\/api\/winuser\/nf-winuser-getguiresources\"> <code>Get\u00adGui\u00adResources<\/code> function<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Funny names for funny functions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-102743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Funny names for funny functions.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}