Why are some GDI functions named ExtXxx instead of XxxEx- May 30, 2008 By convention, an enhanced version of a function Xxx is called XxxEx, but there are many GDI functions that don't follow this conventions, most notably ExtTextOut, which should have been named TextOutEx under the XxxEx convention. Why don't the GDI functions follow that convention Because they were named before the XxxEx convention was established. Nothing nefarious, just an artifact of history.http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/05/30/8560817.aspx The sad demise of whimsical teasing in Comic Chat- May 29, 2008 Internet Explorer 3 came with the IRC client Comic Chat, a product from the research division. And it's not surprising that a program as goofy as Comic Chat would put something goofy in the default profile. If you didn't set a profile when you created your character, it defaulted to "This person is too lazy to create a profile entry." Of course, it wasn't long before people complained that the text was snotty. So much for trying to be funny.http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/05/29/8557109.aspx Why is the function SHStripMneumonic misspelled- May 19, 2008 If you wander through MSDN, you may stumble across the function SHStripMneumonic. The correct spelling is mnemonic. Why is the function name misspelled "It was like that when I got here." The function was originally written for internal use only, and the person who wrote the function spelled the word incorrectly. Still, since it was an internal function, there was no real urgency to fix it. After all, there is no technical consequence of the spelling of a function's name, as early...http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/05/19/8518565.aspx The Big Red Switch really was big and red- May 13, 2008 In this article on compatibility between the .NET Framework versions 1.1 and 2.0, there is a passing mention of a setting nicknamed the "Big Red Switch". The power switch on the original IBM PC really was big and red. Well, orange-red. Here's a picture of the power switch on an IBM PC-AT. Decide for yourself what color it is. In college, the hallway that led to the basement lab where most of the computer science students did their work had a big red switch, a pushbutton, labeled...http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/05/13/8497704.aspx You didn't know you could add properties by atom, and it's a good thing you didn't know- May 2, 2008 As I noted a few days ago, there is weirdness associated with properties added by atom. This weirdness stems from the fact that adding properties by atom is really a hole in the original implementation rather than something designed on purpose. The original 16-bit code for adding and removing properties went roughly like this: BOOL SetProp(HWND hwnd, LPSTR pszName, HANDLE hValue) ... let's look only at the part that adds a new property ... ATOM atm = HIWORD(pszName) ...http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/05/02/8447913.aspx |