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The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts

The 2025/2026 Seattle Symphony subscription season at a glance

The pocket reference guide for 2025/2026.

Fixing exception safety in our task_sequencer

Exception safety, the forgotten requirement.

On launching a dialog when a specific combo box item is selected

Changing selections is not a good time to launch a dialog box.

Why does INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE cast through a LONG_PTR
first?
LONG_PTR
first? 
To ensure that the proper sign extension happens.

We’ll fly you to Atlanta, Texas, and getting to your hotel in Atlanta, Georgia is your problem

Reading the fine print.

A note on the USB-to-PS/2 mouse adapter that came with Microsoft mouse devices

It's a purely mechanical adapter that relies on smarts in the mouse itself.

On how different Windows ABIs choose how to pass 32-bit values in 64-bit registers

Surveying the options and looking for commonalities.

The case of the critical section that let multiple threads enter a block of code

It had one job.

What could cause a memory corruption bug to disappear in safe mode?

A simplified execution environment means fewer things that you can stumble over.