Showing archive results for 2005

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 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...

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...

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...

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.

Just because you have a thread running at a higher priority level doesn't mean that no threads of lower priority will ever run. Occasionally, I see people write multi-threaded code and put one thread's priority higher than the other, assuming that this will prevent the lower-priority thread from interfering with the operation of the higher-prior...

Last night, the MVP Global Summit broke up by product groups for dinner. I was at the Windows Client product group dinner. The problem for me was figuring out who were the MVPs and who were just Microsoft employees looking for MVPs to chat with. Unfortunately, the people who made up the badges didn't think of making it easy to tell who is who. I s...