The Old New Thing

On the importance of backwards compatibility for large corporations

Representatives from the IT department of a major worldwide corporation came to Redmond and took time out of their busy schedule to give a talk on how their operations are set up. I was phenomenally impressed. These people know their stuff. Definitely a world-class operation. One of the tidbits of information they shared with us is some ...

How do I convert an HRESULT to a Win32 error code?

Everybody knows that you can use the macro to convert a Win32 error code to an , but how do you do the reverse? Let's look at the definition of : If the value is less than or equal to zero, then the macro returns the value unchanged. Otherwise, it takes the lower sixteen bits and combines them with and . How do you reverse this ...

Make sure you disable the correct window for modal UI

Some time ago, I was asked to look at two independent problems with people trying to do modal UI manually. Well, actually, when the issues were presented to me, they weren't described in quite that way. They were more along the lines of, "Something strange is happening in our UI. Can you help?" Only in the discussion of the scenarios did it ...

I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature

I often find myself saying, "I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature." "That feature" is something aggressively user-hostile, like forcing a shortcut into the Quick Launch bar or the Favorites menu, like automatically turning on a taskbar toolbar, like adding an icon to the notification area that conveys no useful information...

So that's what daddy does at work

As many people have pointed out, Hallowe'en at Microsoft is a very family-oriented affair. The parents love it because the kids are in a safe environment; the kids love it because instead of having to go from house to house, you just have to walk to the next office, and then there's a big party in the cafeteria afterwards. Though it does ...

Руками не трогать!

Former Microsoft "big-time important guy" Charles Simonyi wants to be the first nerd in space. In this BBC article, he says that he is even learning Russian so he can better understand the systems aboard the Soyuz spacecraft that will take him up and back. (Note to the humor-impaired: Joke begins here.) When his Russian hosts learned this...

Why can't I get my program to use more than 50% of the CPU?

This is sort of the reverse of Why is my CPU usage hovering at 50%?, but the answer is the same. When I run a CPU-intensive task, the CPU percentage used by that process never goes above 50%, and the rest is reported as idle. Is there some setting that I set inadvertently which is preventing the program from using more than half of the CPU...

Now it looks like I speak far more languages than I actually do

The folks over at TechNet Magazine have done something really cool: They've started translating all their articles into Spanish, French, German, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Simplified Chinese. (But no Swedish.) You can change your language on the fly with the combo box in the corner. (MSDN Magazine is doing the same thing. It's ...