The Old New Thingnot actually a .NET blog2008 mid-year link clearance- June 30, 2008 Time for the semi-annual link clearance. Lucy Kellaway campaigns against management jargon. Last November, she railed against a phrase I too had ridiculed: going forward. Scott Adams blogs about going forward. I found it fascinating that of the four ways he thought blogging would be rewarding, only the last one held true. And I can definitely feel for the predicament that every blog post reduced his income. So you're..http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/06/30/8669101.aspx You don't need that 90 byte whereis program any more- June 30, 2008 Yes, you can write a whereis program in 90 bytes but Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista both come with a version of WHERE.EXE, so you don't even need the batch file any more.http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/06/30/8669100.aspx GUIDs are globally unique, but substrings of GUIDs aren't- June 27, 2008 A customer needed to generate an 8-byte unique value, and their initial idea was to generate a GUID and throw away the second half, keeping the first eight bytes. They wanted to know if this was a good idea. No, it's not a good idea. The GUID generation algorithm relies on the fact that it has all 16 bytes to use to establish uniqueness, and if you throw away half of it, you lose the uniqueness. There are multiple GUID generation algorithms, but I'll pick one of them for...http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/06/27/8659071.aspx The mystery of the garbage lady- June 26, 2008 Last year, my good friend and colleague Sarah transfered from the Redmond offices to Microsoft UK in Reading. One of her most popular lunchtime stories is the mystery of the garbage lady, which she finally got around to posting on her blog. Some of my other favorite stories from her blog: That mountian sic where they cut down all the trees: How the geography where you grew up clouds your interpretation of geography elsewhere in the world. New...http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/06/26/8654029.aspx The disappointment of people who need to have their hand held from beginning to end- June 26, 2008 Some customers already have the answer but need to have their hand held. My customer wants to enforce a company-wide policy of disabling the "Keep the taskbar on top of other windows" feature. We have confirmed that there is no group policy setting for controlling this setting. Further research reveals the SHAppBarMessage function. The customer wants to know if there is any way he can write code that will use this function to modify the setting. The customer found a map to a stream, saw.http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/06/26/8654028.aspx The difference between a junior and senior position at a video card company- June 25, 2008 Here are the descriptions (verbatim) of two job positions open at a major video card manufacturer back in the late 1990's: Software Engineer - Drivers The way in to a "hot" company in a "hot" field. This entry level position requires some programming experience with graphics preferred. Senior Software Engineer - Applications (Demos) This senior position requires considerable experience in 3D graphics or multimedia. Design, specification, and implementation of demos for new products...http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/06/25/8649735.aspx Don't require your users to have a degree in philosophy, episode 3- June 24, 2008 While signing up for online bill payment for one of the services I use, I encountered the following check box: Uncheck this box if you do not wish to receive electronic communications from XYZ. This is not simply a negative-sense checkbox; it's a double-negative-sense checkbox! What's wrong with this: Send me electronic communications from XYZ. Oh, right, I know what's wrong with it: It's too easy for people to opt out! Marketing is all about making users ask for something they don't...http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/06/24/8644367.aspx Raymond misreads acronyms: MSPP-PVP- June 23, 2008 I was looking up some information about the Microsoft Partner Program, commonly abbreviated MSPP. I stumbled across an internal wiki called mspp-pvp. My first reaction upon seeing the name was, "What, it's player versus player" I got this images of the CEOs of the various partners wearing VR goggles and running around playing laser tag. No, it's the Partner Velocity Program.http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/06/23/8640473.aspx Just because you're using a smart pointer class doesn't mean you can abdicate understanding what it does- June 23, 2008 It's great when you have a tool to make programming easier, but you still must understand what it does or you're just replacing one set of problems with another set of more subtle problems. For example, we discussed earlier the importance of knowing when your destructor runs. Here's another example, courtesy of my colleague Chris Ashton. This was posted as a Suggestion Box entry, but it's pretty much a complete article on its own. I came across an interesting bug this weekend that I've...http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/06/23/8640472.aspx Why is there a menu show delay, anyway- June 19, 2008 One of the reactions to my note on how the window manager uses the double-click time as a way to tell how good your reflexes are is bemusement, well okay, not so much bemusement as outrage, over why we need a menu show delay in the first place. Imagine, you're navigating a deeply-nested menu hierarchy and then you want to move to one of the items in the most recent fly-out, but instead of moving the mouse directly to the right then down, you move it ever so slightly diagonally down. Boom,.http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/06/19/8619303.aspx |