The Old New Thing

January 2004 - Page 4 of 5 - The Old New Thing

Why can't I GetProcAddress a function I dllexport'ed?

January 12, 2004 Jan 12, 2004 01/12/04
Raymond Chen
The dllexport attribute tells the linker to generate an export table entry for the specified function. This export entry is decorated. This is necessary to support ing of overloaded functions. But it also means that the string you pass to needs to be decorated. As we learned earlier, the decoration scheme varies from architecture to ...

Is there an exclusionary rule in Sweden?

January 11, 2004 Jan 11, 2004 01/11/04
Raymond Chen
According to Friday's Klartext (note: link valid only for one week, then it gets overwritten by the next Friday's Klartext), Vi ska börjar klartext med berätta att en åklagare nu ska undersöka om fler än två hundra poliser i Sverige har brutit mot lagen. Poliserna letade rätt på information om ...

Why do member functions need to be "static" to be used as a callback?

January 9, 2004 Jan 9, 2004 01/9/04
Raymond Chen
As we learned yesterday, nonstatic member functions take a secret "this" parameter, which makes them incompatible with the function signature required by Win32 callbacks. Fortunately, nearly all callbacks provide some way of providing context. You can shove the "this" pointer into the context so you can reconstruct the source object. Here's ...

Ten-year-old + Microsoft Flight Simulator = terrorist

January 9, 2004 Jan 9, 2004 01/9/04
Raymond Chen
Apparently a ten-year-old who put Microsoft Flight Simulator on his Christmas wish-list became the subject of a terrorism investigation. (Warning: I suspect that link will go stale in a week, so read it while you still can.) As always, The Register puts a snarky spin on the story...

It's called "proofreading", give it a shot why don't you

January 8, 2004 Jan 8, 2004 01/8/04
Raymond Chen
Like everybody else, I was checking out the new MSN home page and I clicked over to the tour. And right there as their top headline in the sample web page, it says, "Wierd items of the future". Ahem. It's spelled w-e-i-r-d. And on all of the MSN properties, like local city guides, you can see MSN's new motto: "More Useful Everyday". Um, ...

The history of calling conventions, part 3

January 8, 2004 Jan 8, 2004 01/8/04
Raymond Chen
Okay, here we go: The 32-bit x86 calling conventions. (By the way, in case people didn't get it: I'm only talking in the context of calling conventions you're likely to encounter when doing Windows programming or which are used by Microsoft compilers. I do not intend to cover calling conventions for other operating systems or that are specific...

Budget cuts strike Swedish radio

January 8, 2004 Jan 8, 2004 01/8/04
Raymond Chen
Alas, budget cuts over at Sveriges Radio have reduced the staff of Klartext, the Swedish news program presented in easy Swedish, from three to two, so they won't be able to provide text summaries of the radio show. I had been using the summaries to help me fill in the gaps I had missed, but now I guess I'll just have to listen even more ...

The history of calling conventions, part 2

January 7, 2004 Jan 7, 2004 01/7/04
Raymond Chen
Foreshadowing: This information will actually be useful in a future discussion. Well, not the fine details, but you may notice something that explains... um... it's hard to describe. Just wait for it. Curiously, it is only the 8086 and x86 platforms that have multiple calling conventions. All the others have only one! Now we're going deep ...

Words I'd like to ban in 2004

January 7, 2004 Jan 7, 2004 01/7/04
Raymond Chen
It seems to be fashionable to do a "top words" list this time of year. We have Google 2003 Zeitgeist, Top Yahoo! Searches 2003, Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year for 2003, YourDictionary.com's Top Ten Words of 2003, Lake Superior State University's Banished Words List for 2004; still waiting for the American Dialect Society's choice for ...