The Old New Thing

Computing listview infotips in the background

December 14, 2006 Dec 14, 2006 12/14/06

Raymond Chen

When the listview control asks you for an infotip, it sends you then notification, and when you return, the result is displayed as the infotip. But what if computing the infotip takes a long time? You don't want to stall the UI thread on a long operation, after all. This is where comes in. If you want to say, "Um, I'm not ready with that ...

Maybe if it had characters and stuff and different levels, it would be OK

December 13, 2006 Dec 13, 2006 12/13/06

Raymond Chen

In a classic series, Electronic Games Monthly plopped modern kids, ages 9 through 12, in front of classic video games: Pong, Donkey Kong, Tetris. And then recorded their reactions. Here, the kids are playing Tetris and appear to be obsessed with stuff blowing up. Tim: Which button do I press to make the blocks explode? EGM: Sorry, they ...

Displaying infotips for folded and unfolded listview items

December 13, 2006 Dec 13, 2006 12/13/06

Raymond Chen

When displaying infotips for listview items, you have to deal with both the folded and unfolded case. "Folded" is the term used to describe a listview item in large icon mode whose text has been truncated due to length. When the user selects the item, the full text is revealed, a process known as "unfolding". Take our scratch program and ...

Jeanne Martinet teaches you how to survive a party where you don't know anybody

December 12, 2006 Dec 12, 2006 12/12/06

Raymond Chen

It's the time of year where you may find yourself attending a party where you know hardly anyone. Jeanne Martinet, author of The Art of Mingling, walks Steve Inskeep through a mock-party with tips on how to join a conversation, and (perhaps more importantly) exit one. Don't just read the article; you need to listen to the story. The mock-...

A high waiter count on a free critical section may indicate a lock convoy

December 12, 2006 Dec 12, 2006 12/12/06

Raymond Chen

Nobody can make any progress because they keep getting stuck.

What does an invalid handle exception in LeaveCriticalSection mean?

December 11, 2006 Dec 11, 2006 12/11/06

Raymond Chen

Internally, a critical section is a bunch of counters and flags, and possibly an event. (Note that the internal structure of a critical section is subject to change at any time—in fact, it changed between Windows XP and Windows 2003. The information provided here is therefore intended for troubleshooting and debugging purposes...

Throwing things into a blender and seeing what happens

December 8, 2006 Dec 8, 2006 12/8/06

Raymond Chen

Manufacturer of commercial and home blenders Blendtec has produced a marketing web site Will It Blend? which features short videos of the company's CEO and new Internet blending icon Tom Dickson throwing all sorts of unusual objects into one of their blenders, to see what happens. (The videos are also on YouTube, and of course they have a ...

Do not overload the E_NOINTERFACE error

December 8, 2006 Dec 8, 2006 12/8/06

Raymond Chen

One of the more subtle ways people mess up is returning when the problem wasn't actually an unsupported interface. The return value has very specific meaning. Do not use it as your generic "gosh, something went wrong" error. (Use an appropriate error such as or .) Recall that the rules for are that (in the absence of catastrophic errors...

Okay, I changed my mind, I wrote a book after all

December 7, 2006 Dec 7, 2006 12/7/06

Raymond Chen

The Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows

The wisdom of seventh graders: What to do with a time machine (part 3)

December 6, 2006 Dec 6, 2006 12/6/06

Raymond Chen

(Continuing from part 2.) Here are more sentences from seventh grade time travel essays. Remember, these sentences are not representative of seventh grade writing in general; these are just the funny bits. World History The Future: Most students who travelled to the future wanted to meet themselves. Letter Format: Some students took ...