Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted Web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.NET or Windows issues and workarounds (www.hanselminutes.com/).

In this interview Scott sits down with the original raconteur of Windows, Raymond Chen, to talk about all things Win32 and where Microsoft Bob is currently.

Scott Hanselman: I'm sitting in the office of Raymond Chen, the author of The Old New Thing. I love the book, and when they said, "Hey, put a quote in the front," I said I have to be a part of that. I really appreciate your taking the time to talk to us here. I want to get down to the brass tacks here and find out some of the fundamentals about what you work on? You're doing Win32 in the Shell, right?

Chen: Yeah, I don't even remember when I came over to the User-Interface Group in the Shell team; we're the people who deal with Explorer and common dialogs and that sort of thing. It is mostly Shell32 and Com Dialog, and Com Control and things that hang out in that world.

Hanselman: I remember the great 3D wars of the late mid to late '90s when there were 15-16 different versions of - was it control?

Chen: Control 3D, Control 3D 2.0, Control 3D 2.32.

Hanselman: And hand in subversions within those; why was that such a problem?

Chen: Because if 3D is good, more 3D must be better.

Hanselman: Absolutely. I had a lot of trouble with that. That was DLL Hell; that was the beginning of it, wasn't it?

Chen: I don't know; I was asleep for that part.

Hanselman: Is it really difficult to do versioning like that? You're just exporting a function table; how hard is it to keep those functions looking the same? Why do we get these big - I guess they weren't called GPS back in the day, they were unhandled application exceptions - AUEA; UAE - Unrecoverable Application Error...

Chen: That's' right. Wow! That brings back horrible memories. And you have to make sure not to confuse it with the United Arab Emirates.

Hanselman: In fact yes, the people in Dubai do not appreciate that in any way.

Chen: The people don't like UAEs for some reason. It's like, "We are just minding our own business."

Hanselman: Why was versioning so hard? Why were there so many copies of that DLL?

Chen: I wasn't around for that, but I assume that the reason there were so many copies of that DLL was that everybody thought it was really awesome - or everybody wanted to have their own version of it, because mine is cooler than yours. I realize that I wrote it, it must necessarily be cooler than yours.

Hanselman: Yes, "invented here" syndrome.

Chen: Exactly.

Hanselman: Specifically invented here. Now, I know that you're known for volleying back questions that are not - I wasn't here, sorry, I was sick that day.

Chen: I am very good at rejecting questions.

Hanselman: I appreciate that. Most of this interview will be rejected questions. But I'm more interested in...

Chen: You can listen for them on the deleted scenes.

Hanselman: In fact yes, on the special features. I am interested in versioning because you're living in a non-managed world and I haven't lived there in a while. I flunked the last - last time I flunked was at least 10 years ago and I appreciate the occasional...

Chen: Scars are healed.

Hanselman: In fact, I appreciate the occasional reference pointer and that's great that you guys do that, but is versioning really hard in an unmanaged world, and then you have Methods inside of Shell32 and the different things that you maintain that probably you wish you could yank out, but you just can't for compatibility, right?

Chen: There's stuff that we want to yank out all the time, but we publish the Function, we document it, now we're stuck with it.

Hanselman: From a Static Dependency Analysis perspective, if you can keep those functions looking the same, things will line up, they take the right parameters, but is it really difficult to make sure that the semantics of those functions, including bugs, stays the same?

Chen: Bug-for-bug compatibility is one of the things that you don't appreciate until you have to do it. In fact, looking at the changes between Windows XP and Vista, we see people complaining about things, saying, "Hey, if I pass this invalid string to path is..." and they're like, "path is network path - it used to say it was, and now it says it isn't." We say, "That's right because it isn't." "Well, I was sort of hoping it would still be one because now it's slowing down my program."

Hanselman: I remember literally the day that I double-clicked on the time-date thing and saw that the time-date applet, you had removed the time zones because of that border war or whatever with Peru?

Chen: The time zone one was an Ecuador-Peru Border Wars, I recall.

Hanselman: I was sad; and I said, a feature has been removed and I have seen it happen - I noticed. I am sure that a lot of people didn't notice. I know that you said on Carl's talk, that they remove scraps and then you remove scraps personally...

Chen: I remove scraps.

Hanselman: I noticed damn it. No I didn't really notice. No, I'm kidding.

Chen: I don't think anybody has even noticed yet.

Hanselman: I actually noticed when I make a scrap, and I go, "What the hell is that?"

Chen: What was that? How do I get rid of this thing?

Hanselman: I got that immediately off my desktop. I didn't even open one up once; put to the MZ header to see if it was evil.

Chen: I suspect that most people who created scraps did it completely by mistake, and all the support calls were questions of the form "How do I get rid of this thing?"