I have basically no background writing applications on Windows outside of .Net but I love reading posts by Raymond Chen. I always enjoying learning about things that seem crazy from the outside from have a real purpose that you're just missing information to understand. That's pretty much what looking at someone else's code is often like so it's helpful to remember that even seemingly crazy things have a purpose.

I feel like I've learned a lot from reading his blog over the years. I even bought his book years ago because I felt like I was getting a lot of value from the blog.

It's really too bad Microsoft doesn't seem to value backwards compatibility as much as they did during the times Chen often writes about. It seems like an interesting challenge that they've pretty much given up on. I can't even count how many conversations I've been in where people complained on one hand that Microsoft focused on that backwards compatibility too much and on the other that their driver from 2001 doesn't work right in Windows 7. Often these statements happen moments apart.