The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
The puzzle of trying to put an object into a std::optional
The C++ standard library template type has one of two states. It could be empty (not contain anything), or it could contain a . Suppose you start with an empty . How do you put a into it? One of my colleagues tried to do it in what seemed to be the most natural way: Use the assignment operator. Unfortunately, the assignment failed to compile: I asked for the rest of the error message, because the details will explain what the compiler tried to do (and why it couldn't). It's long, but we'll walk through it. The compiler is showing its work. It's showing you all the possible overloaded assignment opera...
Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems?
Simplifying the problem to an earlier problem.
Debugger breakpoints are usually implemented by patching the in-memory copy of the code
The code in memory may not match what the debugger shows you if the debugger is itself is doing the changing.
The case of a program that crashed on its first instruction
Didn't even make it out of the gate.
Why do I observe reads from a memory-mapped file when writing large blocks?
The CPU doesn't see the entire write at once.
How do I declare an operator overload for my Windows Runtime class?
That's not something expressible in the Windows Runtime.
What’s the difference between Display size and Screen size in the Windows 95 display control panel?
No meaningful difference, though others have created a difference.
On the limits of time travel in the face of undefined behavior in C
C imposes some constraints, but the principle is mostly still there.
On locale-aware substring matching, either case-sensitive or case-insensitive
It's surprisingly complicated, but fortunately, somebody has done it for you.