What's the deal with those reserved filenames like NUL and CON?
Set the wayback machine to DOS 1.0. DOS 1.0 didn’t support subdirectories, lowercase, or filenames longer than 8.3. When you ran the assembler (or compiler if you were really fancy) the conversation...
View ArticleWriting a sort comparison function
When you are writing a sort comparison function (say, to be passed to ListView_SortItems or *gasp* to be used as an IComparer), your comparison function needs to follow these rules: Reflexivity:...
View ArticleWhy Daylight Savings Time is nonintuitive
Welcome Knowledge Base article 932955 readers! Remember, the information on this Web site is not official Microsoft documentation. Daylight Savings Time ends this weekend in most of North America and...
View ArticleKinder Überraschungen
Laura John entertains her colleagues with Kinder Surprise eggs. I love these things. I understand that Kinder Surprise eggs are illegal in the US for two reasons. Small parts. But that can be fixed by...
View ArticleBeing the Nobel Peace Prize
For Hallowe’en this year, I’m going to be the Nobel Peace Prize. (I like being things that people would never even think of as a possible Hallowe’en costume. Last year, I was an inter-office envelope....
View ArticleGetting a custom right-click menu for the caption icon
Explorer does it. Now you can too. It’s a simple matter of detecting a context menu on the caption icon and displaying a custom context menu. Here are the simple changes to our scratch program to...
View ArticleWhen vendors insult themselves
During Windows 95, when we were building the Plug and Play infrastructure, we got an angry letter from a hardware vendor (who shall remain nameless) complaining that we intentionally misspelled their...
View ArticleDrawing an active-looking caption even when not active
“Why would somebody ever want to do that?” you might ask. Well, this is a common appearance for floating toolbars. (But aside from that case, I can’t think of any other valid reason to draw a window...
View ArticleI thought you said people don't know how to read analog clocks
I had mentioned in passing in a comment on 10/10/2003 10:07PM that one of the reasons the clock on the taskbar isn’t analog is that some disturbingly high percentage of people (30%? 40%? I forget...
View ArticleWhy highlighting by inverting colors is a bad idea
Often people will say, “Oh, we can highlight by inverting the color.” This may have worked great on two-color black-and-white displays, but in the world of 32-bit color this no longer is effective....
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