The Old New Thing

I noted some time ago that Windows XP chose your initial picture at random from among the pictures in the %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\User Account Pictures\Default Pictures directory.

In my earlier discussion of the the litte-known winstart.bat batch file in Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, Danielix Klimax wondered whether it was useful in Windows 95, or whether it was primarily used only in Windows 3.x.

When I discussed why we don’t just make the entire stack out of guard pages, commenter BCS wondered, “Why require that the stack use contiguously mapped pages?

After my historical look back on the evolution of system-windows window and class extra bytes, I noted that there was one application that expected to be able to modify GWW_CBCLSEXTRA.

A colleague was trying to figure out why their progress handler wasn’t being called. // C# async Task<bool> DownloadItemAsync(string id) { var op = item.DownloadAsync(id); op.Progress += (s, pct) UpdateProgress(pct); var result = await op;

A colleague ran into trouble with their XAML program.

Recall that Microspeak is not merely for jargon exclusive to Microsoft, but it’s jargon that you need to know to survive at Microsoft.

The Address Windowing Extensions (AWE) is a feature of Windows that allows programs to allocate physical memory and map them on a page-by-page basis into a region of address space (the “address window”).

Last time, we observed that one way to force all derived classes to implement a specific non-virtual method is simply not to implement it in the base class and sit back and wait for the compile-time fireworks.

You may have a base class that implements only partial functionality and relies on the derived class to do the rest.