Showing results for February 2013 - Page 3 of 3 - The Old New Thing

Generally speaking, Enhanced-mode Windows 3.0 ran a copy of standard-mode Windows inside the virtual machine. This statement isn't exactly true, but it's true enough. Commenter Nitpicker objected, "Why are you threatening us with the Nitpicker's Corner for asking about this issue instead of explaining it once and linking it everywhere?" Okay...

Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the star of this story, but I'm told that there was a notable mathematician who believed the Perfect Graph Conjecture to be false and spent many years trying to prove it one way or another. Meanwhile, another mathematician (presumably László Lovász) announced that he had found a pro...

Advanced Query Syntax to the rescue.

A frustrating pattern that shows up occasionally in customer questions is the case where the customer poses a problem, and pre-emptively rejects the mechanism explicitly designed to solve that problem. How can we change the widget color without using IWidget::Set­Color? Um, the whole point of IWidget::Set­Color is to change the color o...

Back in the days of Windows 95, one of my colleagues paid a visit to his counterparts over in the Windows NT team as part of a continuing informal engagement to keep the Windows NT developers aware of the crazy stuff we've been doing on the Windows 95 side. One particular time, his visit occurred in late morning, and it ran ...

I dreamed that I was archiving old data. Some came off an old CP/M floppy disc. Another was an IntelliTrace debug log from the 1980's. Back then, IntelliTrace recorded the history onto index cards, which were stored in trays like in a library card catalog. Made jumping back and forth really easy, but setting breakpoints was a pain.

The parsing name for a shell item is handy, because it lets you regenerate the item later. Actually, the pidl for the shell item is even better, because that is the official way of saving and restoring objects. It's the pidl that gets saved in a shortcut, and since shortcuts can be copied around from machine to machine, pidls must be transportable...

I always wonder about people who are so protective of the name of their event that they don't even allow people to mention it by name. One of the most notorious examples is the organization which runs a major international gathering of athletes which takes place every four years (or every two years if you consider warm-weather sports and cold-weath...

A customer was having trouble with their IContext­Menu implementation. They observed that their IContext­Menu::Query­Context­Menu method was being called, but when the user selected their menu item, IContext­Menu::Invoke­Command was not being called. Given what you know about shell context menus, you can already direct th...