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Hanselman: You said that the semantics are very difficult to maintain. I may be misspeaking here, but I understand there is some kind of a secret, evil, parallel universe inside of a Windows Box, that's like the application compatibility - we know everything there is to know about Arthur's Teacher Trouble so we will patch up these six APIs.

Chen: There is a not insubstantial database of programs and all the little things that have to be done to keep them happy. It doesn't even begin to cover all of the applications out there. The AppCompat Team has a rather large library but it's clearly not comprehensive.

Hanselman: How are they doing that? They are literally saying, Arthur's Teacher Trouble doesn't work anymore; and it's because they are passing nonsense to get path info or something.

Chen: Those guys are amazing; they have to have a pretty good knowledge of large chunks of the system. When a program stops working, they are usually the ones who do the initial debugging to figure out what's going on. Once they narrow it down, they can hand it off to a particular component team if they determine that there is a shell functionality change that's causing trouble, then they can send it over our way, but they have a pretty tough job at having to figure out even what area the problem even lies in.

Hanselman: Specific to the Shell, when I go Properties, Compatibility, and I see all of that stuff, it seems like I'm doing that a lot now in Vista. I'm saying, "No no, XP Service Pack 2.0." What exactly is happening there? You are patching, Get Version?

Chen: When you pick one of those larger categories, if you run the - I'm trying to remember what it's called - the Application Compatibility Toolkit.

Hanselman: Yeah where is that it's like app compatwiz.exe?

Chen: Search your favorite search engine, and hopefully it will turn up. The Application Compatibility Toolkit lets you apply individual fixes, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of them to a specific application. If you use the Compatibility Page, then it's similar to a combo meal, where we sort of have the Windows XP combo meal, or if you pick this, we'll apply these 25 fixes that tend to cover most of the problems that application has had. They can range from just reporting that it's Windows XP, even though it really is Windows Vista, to checking applications to see if they try to access a file by an old file name; we turned it into the new file name before sending it through.

Hanselman: It's lying.

Chen: Its various degrees of sleight of hand.

Hanselman: Back in the day, when men were men and the program manager reigned supreme, you came in a Windows 95 kind of universe, right? Was it Chicago or was it Memphis?

Chen: It was called Cougar back then.

Hanselman: Oh my!

Chen: Yeah it was - that was actually a precursor project to what eventually became Windows 95.

Hanselman: The icons were prettier. Back in the day before Windows XP, before Windows 2000, there were fewer device contexts, fewer brushes. There was a minimal amount of stuff that you could paint. I remember, every once in a while, when my computer got really stressed out, icons would started turning black.

Chen: Ah yes, the black icons.

Hanselman: Why?

Chen: Because you ran out of GDI resource and somebody tries...

Hanselman: But you also had a black brush though. I mean, someone was able to why not paint them white, why black?

Chen: The way icons are drawn, you have your mask and then you have - if you recall, a bitmap - an icon back in the day consisted of two bitmaps: a monochrome mask bitmap and a color bitmap, and the algorithm was to and with the mask and then XOR with the color bitmap. The mask contained black pixels everywhere you wanted color to show through. If you ran into a problem with the color part, all you got was the mask part that set pixels to black. The job of the mask was to set pixels to black and the job of the color part was to start coloring them in again; if you ran out of resources in the color part, all you got was stuff getting set to black.

Hanselman: The icons now...

Chen: It's through the magic of Boolean algebra, that old "and" thing; it's really easy to make things black.

Hanselman: Didn't get that at community callers; I'm really looking at this - Boolean algebra, let's all Google for that, find out what that is

Chen: I think in the new method, it's just called "True False Algebra."

Hanselman: Like an "if" statement.

Chen: "If" is too judgmental; we just like to call it "whenever."

Hanselman: Raymond has a standup career on the side in his mind. A lot of people pick on Explorer; they pick on it a lot, and I'm sure you must get that.

Chen: Like I pick on it a lot.

Hanselman: Some people call it the Explorer, sometimes it crashes. One of the things I get frustrated with is when some one - I always like to anthropomorphize...

Chen: Back in the old days, we also called it File Damager.

Hanselman: That's brutal dude. We're at the Microsoft campus and we're talking like this. It's bad.

Chen: We actually, over lunch or over beer or over beer at lunch, as many people do, spend our time trying to come up with derogatory terms for products around the world; and it turns out there are a lot of Microsoft products that we're familiar with so we spend a lot of time coming up with derogatory names for them. Part of this is just to desensitize ourselves so that when we hear it out in the wild, we don't feel so bad.

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