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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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...