The Old New Thing

There's a whole Internet out there, folks, you might want to check it out

July 30, 2007 Jul 30, 2007 07/30/07
Raymond Chen
If you're going to add a topic to the Suggestion Box,¹ at least do the courtesy of researching the question before asking it. It takes me an hour to answer each question; it's only fair that you spend ten minutes making it a good question. For example, one entry in the Suggestion Box asked for the story behind the hotkey. But even the ...

Don't just grab the foreground window and host UI on it

July 27, 2007 Jul 27, 2007 07/27/07
Raymond Chen
I was asked to look at an application compatibility bug in a program from a major vendor. But that's actually irrelevant; what I'm writing about today has nothing to do with application compatibility. That's just what drew my attention to the program in the first place. At some point during the install, the setup program encountered an error ...

What is Dave's frame class?

July 25, 2007 Jul 25, 2007 07/25/07
Raymond Chen
Back in 2004, we lost Dave's frame class. Dave's frame class, or more accurately, DavesFrameClass, was the window class that drew the CPU meter on the Performance page of Task Manager. As you might have guessed, Dave was the name of the original author of Task Manager. (If the checked version of Task Manager from NT 4 encountered an ...

Just because you say something in my presence and I don't raise an objection doesn't mean that I agree

July 24, 2007 Jul 24, 2007 07/24/07
Raymond Chen
This is a sneaky trick that people try to pull occasionally. They'll say something while I happen to be present (either physically in person or virtually by adding me to an email conversation) and see what my reaction is. If I don't say anything, then they assume that I agree with whatever it is they said. Just to make it official: Just ...