Igor Delovski Board

[admin]

The Old New Thing, Raymond's blog should be on every serious developer's list of daily rituals. You need to brush your teets, you need to eat healthy food, you need some exercise and you've got to visit Raymond's site every single day.

We'll have here a lot of links to his articles.

Thursday, June 15, 2006: Window class properties apply to all windows that belong to the class

[Ben]

Raymond rulez!

[Marko]

Understanding what significant digits really mean: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/06/16/634078.aspx

"I multiplied 0.619207 by 10,000,000 and got 6192069.999999991 instead of 6192070. That's only six significant digits; where's my fifteen?"

[delovski]

Some Win32 API history:
What about BOZOSLIVEHERE and TABTHETEXTOUTFORWIMPS?

"This is just the tip of the iceberg with respect to application
compatibility. I could probably write for months solely about bad things
apps do and what we had to do to get them to work again (often in spite of
themselves). Which is why I get particularly furious when people accuse
Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any
application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure. I
spent many sleepless nights fixing bugs in third-party programs just so
they could keep running on Windows 95."

[Ike]

On the importance of backwards compatibility for large corporations

"One of the tidbits of information they shared with us is some numbers
about the programs they have to support. Their operations division is responsible
for 9,000 different install scripts for their employees around the world.

That was not a typo."

[delovski]

There's a reason why envelopes have backs

"For some reason, people are upset that I don't have hard data for the
cost difference between "slow" and "fast" mode enumeration. I already did
a back-of-the-envelope calculation that showed that fast mode reduces the
total time to enumerate the items in a folder from five minutes to two
seconds. That's what's so great about back-of-the-envelope calculations:
They let you make decisions without actually having to implement every
possible solution."

[Ike]

The name WinMain is just a convention

"Although the function WinMain is documented in the Platform SDK, it's
not really part of the platform. Rather, WinMain is the conventional name
for the user-provided entry point to a Windows program."

[delovski]

Okay, I changed my mind, I wrote a book after all

"... last year I decided to give this book thing another go, only to find that
publishers generally aren't interested in this stuff any more. Luckily, I found
a sympathetic ear from the folks at Addison-Wesley Professional who were
willing to take a chance on my unorthodox proposal.

Eighteen months later, we have The Old New Thing: Practical Development
Throughout the Evolution of Windows, ..."

I have placed a preorder on this book today and while I was there on Amazon,
I took two other books: "ATL Internals", by Brent E. Rector and "Quartz 2D
Graphics for Mac OS X", by R. Scott Thompson.

All three books were published by Addison-Wesley and that probably means
something.

But if they printed only a few thousands of Raymond, the book will be out of
print in a couple of months and after that you'll be able to find it on eBay
for only $100 or maybe even more.

[delovski]

2006 end-of-year link clearance

"And then the obligatory plug for my column in TechNet Magazine"

[delovski]

Raymond also writes TechNet Magazine's Windows Confidential column. He's
not so regular as on his own blog but he does relevant work there anyway.

[delovski]

Nice rule (Fun puzzles):

[XNote]

How do 16-bit programs start up?

"There was no C language standardization committee back then; C was
what Dennis said it was, and it was hardly guaranteed that Dennis would
take any special steps to preserve Windows source code compatibility in
any future version of the C language."