The Old New Thing

GUIDs are globally unique, but substrings of GUIDs aren’t

June 27, 2008 Jun 27, 2008 06/27/08

Raymond Chen

Half of a GUID is worse than none.

The mystery of the garbage lady

June 26, 2008 Jun 26, 2008 06/26/08

Raymond Chen

Last year, my good friend and colleague Sarah transfered from the Redmond offices to Microsoft UK in Reading. One of her most popular lunchtime stories is the mystery of the garbage lady, which she finally got around to posting on her blog. Some of my other favorite stories from her blog: A colleague of mine experienced the ...

The disappointment of people who need to have their hand held from beginning to end

June 26, 2008 Jun 26, 2008 06/26/08

Raymond Chen

Some customers already have the answer but need to have their hand held. My customer wants to enforce a company-wide policy of disabling the "Keep the taskbar on top of other windows" feature. We have confirmed that there is no group policy setting for controlling this setting. Further research reveals the function. The customer wants to ...

The difference between a junior and senior position at a video card company

June 25, 2008 Jun 25, 2008 06/25/08

Raymond Chen

Here are the descriptions (verbatim) of two job positions open at a major video card manufacturer back in the late 1990's: Software Engineer - Drivers The way in to a "hot" company in a "hot" field. This entry level position requires some programming experience with graphics preferred. Senior Software Engineer - Applications (Demos) ...

Don't require your users to have a degree in philosophy, episode 3

June 24, 2008 Jun 24, 2008 06/24/08

Raymond Chen

While signing up for online bill payment for one of the services I use, I encountered the following check box: Uncheck this box if you do not wish to receive electronic communications from XYZ. This is not simply a negative-sense checkbox; it's a double-negative-sense checkbox! What's wrong with this: Send me electronic communications from...

Raymond misreads acronyms: MSPP-PVP

June 23, 2008 Jun 23, 2008 06/23/08

Raymond Chen

I was looking up some information about the Microsoft Partner Program, commonly abbreviated MSPP. I stumbled across an internal wiki called . My first reaction upon seeing the name was, "What, it's player versus player?" I got this images of the CEOs of the various partners wearing VR goggles and running around playing laser tag. No, it's ...

Just because you're using a smart pointer class doesn't mean you can abdicate understanding what it does

June 23, 2008 Jun 23, 2008 06/23/08

Raymond Chen

It's great when you have a tool to make programming easier, but you still must understand what it does or you're just replacing one set of problems with another set of more subtle problems. For example, we discussed earlier the importance of knowing when your destructor runs. Here's another example, courtesy of my colleague Chris Ashton. ...

Donations to the Microsoft Archives: Pens, CDs, and paperweights

June 20, 2008 Jun 20, 2008 06/20/08

Raymond Chen

Among other responsibilities, the Archives department preserves Microsoft history, be it old hardware, old software, old documentation, or ephemera. Last year, one of my colleagues was cleaning out his office because he was moving to Granada, and of the junk he was going to throw out, the Archives asked me to save the following: and my ...

Why is there a menu show delay, anyway?

June 19, 2008 Jun 19, 2008 06/19/08

Raymond Chen

So you don't lose a big menu because you lost a mouse dexterity game.

MSDN-speak: What does it mean when a parameter contains a value?

June 18, 2008 Jun 18, 2008 06/18/08

Raymond Chen

I've seen some confusion over this, heck I've been confused by this, so I figured I'd share what I've learned. In MSDN, you may see wording like this: pdwResult [out] When the function returns, contains a pointer to a value that contains the result of the computation. What they're trying to say is that the is a pointer to a that ...