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Commenter Travis Owens asks,
" Why was the RAM drive removed from Windows 95 ?" As with many of these types of accusatory questions,
this comes with a false hidden assumption,
in this case,
that the RAM drive was in Windows 95 to begin with. Remember Read More...
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The hardware folks had this mouse wheel thing they were making,
and they needed a way to get applications to support the mouse.
Now, one way of doing this was to say,
"Well, we'll start selling this wheel mouse,
but no applications can use it until the Read More...
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At last we reach the 32-bit extended menu template.
Introduced in Windows 95, this remains the
most advanced menu template format through Windows Vista.
As you might expect, the 32-bit extended menu template is
just a 32-bit version of the 16-bit extended Read More...
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Windows 95 introduced a new menu format,
known as "extended menus".
You declare these in a resource file with the MENUEX keyword.
The 16-bit extended menu is really just a temporary stopping point
on the way to the 32-bit extended menu,
since the 16-bit Read More...
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8 wonders why the "Install Font" dialog looks so old-school.
(And Kevin Provance demonstrates poor reading skills by not only ignoring the paragraph that explains why the suggestion box
is closed, but also asking a question that's a dup of one already Read More...
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Now that we've got a handle on 16-bit classic menu templates ,
we can move on to the next evolutionary step,
namely 32-bit classic menu templates. The 32-bit classic menu template is in fact nearly identical to the
16-bit classic menu template.
The only Read More...
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We saw last time that you can specify a separator in a menu item template
by specifying zero for everything,
even though technically you're supposed to pass MFT_SEPARATOR for the flags.
What's the deal with that alternate
form for menu item template separators? Read More...
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Menus aren't as complicated as dialogs.
There are no fonts, no positioning,
it's just a list of menu items and flags.
Well, okay, there's the recursive part,
when a menu has a submenu.
But that's really the only wrinkle.
Most of it is pretty boring. The Read More...
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As with dialog templates ,
menu templates have also gone through a four-stage evolutionary process.
People don't often generate menu templates in code,
although the LoadMenuIndirect function
is there waiting for you once you get the urge.
As a result, Read More...
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If you look at the LOADPARMS32 structure,
you'll find a horrific mishmash.
Double-null-terminated strings,
a null-terminated string,
some WORD s, and
even a Pascal-style string. What's going on here ? Each of those members comes from a different era in Read More...
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Among other responsibilities,
the Archives department preserves
Microsoft history,
be it old hardware ,
old software,
old documentation,
or ephemera.
Last year,
one of my colleagues was cleaning out his office
because he was moving to Granada ,
and of Read More...
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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 Read More...
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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 Read More...
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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 Read More...
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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 Read More...
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