Showing results for October 2005 - Page 4 of 5 - The Old New Thing

Different objects have different thread affinity rules, but the underlying principles come from 16-bit Windows. The most important user interface element is of course the window. Window objects have thread affinity. The thread that creates a window is the one with which the window has an inseparable relationship. Informally, one says that the th...

When analyzing the performance of a program, you must be mindful that your performance analysis tools can themselves affect the operation of the system you are analyzing. This is especially true if the performance analysis tool is running on the same computer as the program being studied. People often complain that Explorer takes a page fault eve...

My colleague Marc Miller wrote up a brief essay on the subject of dealing with a neutral apartment that has been injected into your single-threaded apartment: COMmunism: Sharing your Apartment. Highly recommended.

My colleague Jensen Harris from the Office User Interface team has joined the 7am club, posting fascinating glimpes into Office history and the upcoming version of Office code-named "Office 12". And they come out at 7am every weekday. Then again, maybe he's not real either. Maybe he's some kind of a robot.

Some people have noticed that if you load a DLL with the flag, you sometimes get strange behavior if you then pass that to a dialog box function. The problem here is that since the bottom 16 bits of a proper are always zero, different components have "borrowed" those bits for different purposes. The kernel uses the bottom bit to distinguish mo...

Many people suggest solving the backwards compatibility problem by merely running old programs in a virtual machine. This only solves part of the problem. Sure, you can take a recalcitrant program and run it in a virtual machine, with its own display, its own hard drive, its own keyboard, etc. But there are very few types of programs (games being...

In 1999, Eric Schulman published A Briefer History of Time, based upon his previous effort to capture the history of the universe in 200 words. The book takes the initial 200-word summary and expands upon each phrase, surreptitiously teaching you some science among the jokes. (You can even watch a video.) And then this Hawking guy shows up an...

As I already noted, I went down to Los Angeles a few days before the PDC to spend time with friends and relatives. I stayed with a cousin who works for a major video game manufacturer, and his boss gave him a homework assignment: He was told to go home and play a specific video game. (Unfortunately, it wasn't a particularly good video game, but hi...

More often I see the reverse of the "Low priority threads can run even when higher priority threads are running" problem. Namely, people who think that is a clean way to yield CPU. For example, they might have run out of things to do and merely wish to wait for another thread to produce some work. Recall that the scheduler looks for the highest...

Sure, I like saying "withered hand", but Google took this a bit too far and made me the top hit for the phrase , making me more popular than Jesus with respect to that phrase, at least for now. I apologize to all the people looking for the Miracle of the Withered Hand. Fortunately, MSN Search and Yahoo were not fooled.