The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Saturday, January 24, 2004

A twisty passage of Windows, all fragile

The HLT instruction tells the CPU to shut itself down until the next hardware interrupt. This is a big win on laptops since it reduces power consumption and thereby saves your lap from third-degree burns.

We (well, specifically, Jeff) had this implemented and working in Windows 95 but discovered to our dismay that there were many laptops (some from a major manufacturer) which would lock up unrecoverably if you issued a HLT instruction.

So we had to back it out.

Then the aftermarket HLT programs came out and people wrote, “Stupid Microsoft. Why did they leave this feature out of Windows.” I had to sit quietly while people accused Microsoft of being stupid and/or lazy and/or selfish.

Hardw are Backwards compatibility

From Mark come a pointer to Raymond Chen's weblog, a developer from Microsoft. An amazing insight into Microsoft development, covering why they did what they did, and >why they do what they do.

Even if you aren't a developer for Microsoft Windows, it's still facinating reading, such as this little bit:

CreateMenu creates a horizontal menu bar, suitable for attaching to a top-level window. This is the sort of menu that says “File, Edit”, and so on.

CreatePopupMenu creates a vertical popup menu, suitable for use as a submenu of another menu (either a horizontal menu bar or another popup menu) or as the root of a context menu.

If you get the two confused, you can get strange menu behavior. Windows on rare occasions detects that you confused the two converts as appropriate, but I wouldn't count on Windows successfully reading your mind.

What' s the difference between CreateMenu and CreatePopupMenu?

From reading Raymond's blog, it seems that Microsoft goes to great lengths to protect mediocre programmers and keep their programs running; their backwards compatibility legacy is quite impressive (I can still run an editor written in 1982 under MS-DOS 1.0 on Windows XP, some twenty-two years later). With so much legacy code (MS-DOS versions 1.0 (1981) through 7.x (1995) and Windows 1.0 (1985) through Windows XP) it's no wonder Windows is such a mess, much less that it still runs.

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