Old New Thing, The Quotes

“80386 instruction set supports interlocked increment and decrement, but the result of the increment/decrement operation is not returned. Only the flags are updated by the operation. As a result, the only information you get back from the CPU about the result of the operation is whether it was zero, positive, or negative. (Okay, you also get some obscure information such as whether there were an even or odd number of 1 bits in the result, but that’s hardly useful nowadays.)”
― Raymond Chen, Old New Thing, The: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows, The

“Registry Editor and look at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Compatibility, you’ll see a list of programs that would have stopped working when you upgraded from Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.1. Actually, this list is only partial. Many times, the compatibility fix is made inside the core component for all programs rather than targeting a specific program, as this list does.”
― Raymond Chen, Old New Thing, The: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows, The

“Windows User Interface Design Specifications and Guidelines”
― Raymond Chen, Old New Thing, The: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows, The

“The development team knows how to read assembly language and debug applications to determine where the compatibility problem lies and determine the appropriate course of action to get the application back on its feet. Your typical end users do not have this skill and have no interest in learning it. They just want to get their work done.”
― Raymond Chen, Old New Thing, The: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows, The

“There’s something about Rat Poker”
― Raymond Chen, Old New Thing, The: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows, The

“(For Windows Vista, the recommended DPI settings are 96, 120, 144, and 192; so you should make sure your program looks acceptable at each of these settings at a minimum.)”
― Raymond Chen, Old New Thing, The: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows, The