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When people ask for security holes as features
Blog Post:
The story of the mysterious WINA20.386 file
Raymond Chen - MSFT
matushorvath was curious about the WINA20.386 file that came with some versions of MS-DOS . The WINA20.386 file predates my involvement, but I was able to find some information on the Internet that explained what it was for. And it's right there in KB article Q68655: Windows 3.0 Enhanced Mode...
on
6 Feb 2012
Blog Post:
Why doesn't the Windows 7 Start menu have a pushpin for pinning items?
Raymond Chen - MSFT
You may have noticed a minor inconsistency between pinning a program to the Start menu and pinning a destination to a program's Jump List. Although pinned items appear at the top of the respective lists, and both the Start menu and Jump List let you right-click an item and select Pin/Unpin, the Jump...
on
26 Jan 2012
Blog Post:
What were some of the abandoned features of Explorer back in its prototype days?
Raymond Chen - MSFT
Chris asked for some stories about what Explorer was like in the early days . Well, one thing is that the original name of Explorer was Cabinet , continuing the folder/document metaphor by taking all your folders and documents and putting them inside a virtual filing cabinet . (Cabinet was viewed...
on
9 Jan 2012
Blog Post:
Why wasn't the Windows 95 shell prototyped on Windows NT?
Raymond Chen - MSFT
Carlos wonders why the Windows 95 shell was prototyped as 16-bit code running on the still-under-development 32-bit kernel, USER, and GDI as opposed to being prototyped as fully 32-bit code on Windows NT . There were a number of reasons, some good, some bad. One reason was that the Windows...
on
2 Jan 2012
Blog Post:
Deftly solving compatibility problems by withholding information
Raymond Chen - MSFT
One of the continuing compatibility problems that plagued Direct3D was the way it reported texture formats. Historically, the way an application checked which texture formats were available was by calling EnumZBufferFormats and passing a callback function which is called once for each...
on
21 Dec 2011
Blog Post:
Why is CLIPFORMAT defined to be a WORD rather than a UINT?
Raymond Chen - MSFT
Commenter Ivo wants to know if the RegisterClipboardFormat function returns a UINT , why is the CLIPFORMAT data type defined to be a WORD ? Since a WORD is smaller than a UINT , you have to stick in a cast every time you assign the result of RegisterClipboardFormat to a...
on
28 Nov 2011
Blog Post:
Why not use animated GIFs as a lightweight alternative to AVIs in the animation common control?
Raymond Chen - MSFT
Commenter Vilx- wondered why animated GIFs weren't used as the animation format for the shell animation common control . After all, "they are even more lightweight than AVIs." Animated GIFs are certainly more lightweight than general AVIs, since AVI is just a container format, so decoding a general...
on
21 Nov 2011
Blog Post:
The life story of the SwitchToThisWindow function
Raymond Chen - MSFT
Commenters Mick and Nick (you guys ever considered teaming up and forming a morning radio show?) are interested in the life story of the SwitchToThisWindow function . The SwitchToThisWindow was originally added in enhanced mode Windows 3.0 in order to support switching...
on
7 Nov 2011
Blog Post:
Why do the pinned items in the Jump List go on the top instead of the bottom?
Raymond Chen - MSFT
When you pin items to the Jump List, they go to the top of the menu that appears when you right-click the Taskbar item. Why not put the pinned items at the bottom? After all, over 98% of users leave the taskbar at the bottom of the screen , so putting the pinned items at the bottom of the list maintains...
on
27 Oct 2011
Blog Post:
When your vice president tells you to stop replying to a mail thread, you probably should stop replying to the mail thread
Raymond Chen - MSFT
Some time in the early part of this century, somebody sent a message to the Windows NT Development Announcements mailing list at Microsoft. It went something like, "My car was parked in «location X» and somebody ran into it and didn't leave a note. Does anybody have any information about...
on
14 Oct 2011
Blog Post:
Throwing garbage on the sidewalk: The sad history of the rundll32 program
Raymond Chen - MSFT
During the development of Windows Vista, the application comaptibility team traced a bunch of issues back to people corrupting the stack by using the rundll32 program to call functions that were not designed to be called by rundll32 . The problems were often subtle. For example, a batch file which...
on
9 Sep 2011
Blog Post:
Why doesn't the Disk Management snap-in incorporate S.M.A.R.T. data?
Raymond Chen - MSFT
My article a while back on Why the Disk Management snap-in reports my volume as Healthy when the drive is dying gave the low-level explanation of why the Disk Management snap-in does not incorporate SMART information: because the Disk Management snap-in is concerned with volume partitioning. DWalker59...
on
8 Sep 2011
Blog Post:
What's the story with the parameters to the WM_INPUT_DEVICE_CHANGE message?
Raymond Chen - MSFT
A customer found these strange macros in winuser.h : #if (_WIN32_WINNT >= 0x0601) #define GET_DEVICE_CHANGE_WPARAM(wParam) (LOWORD(wParam)) #elif (_WIN32_WINNT >= 0x0501) #define GET_DEVICE_CHANGE_LPARAM(lParam) (LOWORD(lParam)) #endif /* (_WIN32_WINNT >= 0x0601) */ According to the...
on
2 Sep 2011
Blog Post:
Random musings on the introduction of long file names on FAT
Raymond Chen - MSFT
Tom Keddie thinks that the format of long file names on FAT deserves an article . Fortunately, I don't have to write it; somebody else already did . So go read that article first. I'm just going to add some remarks and stories. Hi, welcome back. Coming up with the technique of setting...
on
26 Aug 2011
Blog Post:
Menu item states are not reliable until they are shown because they aren't needed until then
Raymond Chen - MSFT
A question arrived from a customer (with the rather unhelpful subject line Question for Microsoft ) wondering why, when they call GetSystemMenu and then ask for the states of the various menu items like SC_ MINIMIZE , the menu item states don't reflect reality. The menu item states don't...
on
5 Aug 2011
Blog Post:
Why is secur32.dll called secur32.dll and not secure32.dll?
Raymond Chen - MSFT
Many years ago, in a discussion of why you shouldn't name your DLL "security.dll" , I dug a bit into the history behind the DLL. Here are some other useless tidbits about that file. Originally, there were two DLLs called security.dll . One was the 32-bit version and one was the 16-bit version....
on
21 Jul 2011
Blog Post:
What is that horrible grinding noise coming from my floppy disk drive?
Raymond Chen - MSFT
Wait, what's a floppy disk drive? For those youngsters out there, floppy disks are where we stored data before the invention of the USB earring. A single floppy disk could hold up to two seconds of CD-quality audio. This may not sound like a lot, but it was in fact pretty darned awesome, because...
on
14 Jul 2011
Blog Post:
Windows has supported multiple UI languages for over a decade, but nobody knew it
Raymond Chen - MSFT
In the early days of Windows, there was a separate version of Windows for each language, and once you decided to install, say, the French version of Windows, you were locked into using French. You couldn't change your mind and, say, switch to German . The reason for this is that there were bits and...
on
11 Jul 2011
Blog Post:
A handful of trips through the time machine
Raymond Chen - MSFT
A few trips through the time machine: 24 years of Windows package design . Boot screens through the ages Microsoft producivity applications through the decades . (Warning: Marketing video.) Many of the locations in the first part of that video are from Microsoft's main campus....
on
4 Jul 2011
Blog Post:
How long do taskbar notification balloons appear on the screen?
Raymond Chen - MSFT
We saw some time ago that taskbar notification balloons don't penalize you for being away from the computer . But how long does the balloon stay up when the user is there? Originally, the balloon appeared for whatever amount of time the application specified in the uTimeout member of the NOTIFYICONDATA...
on
18 May 2011
Blog Post:
Why is hybrid sleep off by default on laptops? (and how do I turn it on?)
Raymond Chen - MSFT
Hybrid sleep is a type of sleep state that combines sleep and hibernate . When you put the computer into a hybrid sleep state, it writes out all its RAM to the hard drive (just like a hibernate), and then goes into a low power state that keeps RAM refreshed (just like a sleep). The idea is that you...
on
10 May 2011
Blog Post:
Holding down the shift key when right-clicking lets you pin things to the Start menu even when you might have been better off not doing so
Raymond Chen - MSFT
Holding the shift key when calling up a context menu is a convention for indicating that you want to see additional advanced options which are normally hidden. One of those options is Pin to Start menu . What is this doing as an extended command? The Pin to Start menu command normally appears...
on
11 Apr 2011
Blog Post:
The introduction of whimsical teasing in Comic Chat
Raymond Chen - MSFT
A few months after my post on the sad demise of whimsical teasing in Comic Chat , I received a piece of email from none other than the author of Comic Chat, DJ Kurlander : I was the person that started the Comic Chat project in Microsoft Research and was responsible for that line, "This person...
on
1 Apr 2011
Blog Post:
Why is there the message '!Do not use this registry key' in the registry?
Raymond Chen - MSFT
Under Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Explorer\ Shell Folders , there is a message to registry snoopers: The first value is called "!Do not use this registry key" and the associated data is the message "Use the SHGetFolderPath or SHGetKnownFolderPath...
on
22 Mar 2011
Blog Post:
What does the "l" in lstrcmp stand for?
Raymond Chen - MSFT
If you ask Michael Kaplan , he'd probably say that it stands for lame . In his article, Michael presents a nice chart of the various L-functions and their sort-of counterparts. There are other L-functions not on his list, not because he missed them, but because they don't have anything to do...
on
17 Mar 2011
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