This Web site is not for beginners. I try to write for advanced programmers, and if you’re not an advanced programmer, then you’ll just have to accept that there will be times you are baffled by what I write. Often I dial the geek back a notch, explaining some things which should be “obvious” to an advanced programmer, such as why storing a constant pointer into a stack location from dynamically-generated code is a clear indicator of a framework thunk. But I will dial it back only so far, and eventually you may just be forced to (horrors!) do your own background research to get yourself up to speed or simply give up and see if you have better luck with the next entry.

There are some topics I have sitting in my ideas folder which I will probably never actually post about because they are so advanced that even Don Box, COM guru extraordinaire, admitted in email to me that they’re too advanced even for his super-advanced book on COM. At the PDC, talks used to be categorized as 100, 200, 300, or 400-level, mimicking the categorization of classes at most U.S. universities, with 100-level classes being introductory, and 400-classes being college senior seminar type stuff. COM weak QueryInterface would be somewhere at the graduate research level. Stuff so esoteric, nobody would actually need to know it.

To be honest, I don’t think I’ve written anything truly advanced in a long time. It’s all been fairly intermediate for the past few years. People don’t seem to mind too much, so I’ll just keep it going.