July 2010 | The Old New Thing

Decoding the parameters of a thrown C++ exception (0xE06D7363)

Raymond ChenJuly 30, 2010Jul 30, 201007/30/10

Special preview content for my TechReady talk later today. I'd like to claim it was planned this way, but actually it was just a coincidence. The Visual C++ compiler uses exception code 0xE06D7363 for C++ exceptions. Here's how you can decode the other parameters. (Handy if you're debugging a crash dump.) Note that this information ...

Holy cow, those TechReady attendees really love their tchotchkes

Raymond ChenJuly 29, 2010Jul 29, 201007/29/10

I was at the Ask the Experts event last night at TechReady11, and if I didn't know better, I would have thought the purpose of Ask the Experts was for attendees to wander the room collecting the coolest swag they could get their hands on as quickly as possible. My table was equipped with about two dozen Windows 7 frisbees, and the moment ...

Why is my icon being drawn at the wrong size when I call DrawIcon?

Raymond ChenJuly 29, 2010Jul 29, 201007/29/10

Some time ago I had a problem with icon drawing. When I tried to draw an icon with DrawIcon it ended up being drawn at the wrong size. A call to GetIconInfo confirmed that the icon was 48×48, but it drew at 32×32. The answer is documented in a backwards sort of way in the DrawIconEx function, which says ...

The frustration of people who have already decided on the solution and won't let you derail them with your annoying questions

Raymond ChenJuly 28, 2010Jul 28, 201007/28/10

I illustrate this frustration with an actual mail thread (suitably redacted) which I was an observer to. It's a long thread because that's part of the frustration. From: Adam I am looking for some expert advice here on finding a better solution to our performance problem with Product P. Here are the details. [Here follow the details...

Hardware backward compatibility: The finicky floppy drive

Raymond ChenJuly 27, 2010Jul 27, 201007/27/10

I think the behavior is more petulant than finicky, but finicky is alliterative. Back in the days of Windows 95, I was talking with the person responsible for, among other things, the floppy disk driver, and I learned about a particular driver hack that was needed to work around a flaw in a very common motherboard chipset. Apparently ...

Why didn't Windows XP auto-elevate programs beyond those named setup.exe?

Raymond ChenJuly 26, 2010Jul 26, 201007/26/10

Commenter J-F has a friend who wonders why Windows XP didn't auto-elevate all installers but rather only the ones named setup.exe. (Perhaps that friend's name is Josh, who repeated the question twelve days later.) Remember what the starting point was. In Windows 2000, nothing was auto-elevated. Before adding a feature, you have ...

MSDN content is also available as a Web service

Raymond ChenJuly 23, 2010Jul 23, 201007/23/10

Unless you've been living under a rock, by now you know about MSDN's low bandwidth view (aka ScriptFree) and lightweight view. But there are other views too, like PDA view (for when you want to look up MSDN documentation on your phone?), Robot view, printer-friendly view, unstyled HTML view... (See that first link above for more details.) ...

If I'm not supposed to call IsBadXxxPtr, how can I check if a pointer is bad?

Raymond ChenJuly 23, 2010Jul 23, 201007/23/10

Some time ago, I opined that IsBadXxxPtr should really be called CrashProgramRandomly and you really should just let the program crash if somebody passes you a bad pointer. It is common to put pointer validation code at the start of functions for debugging purposes (as long as you don't make logic decisions based on ...

I will be speaking at TechReady11

Raymond ChenJuly 22, 2010Jul 22, 201007/22/10

Microsoft has an internal conference known as TechReady, the eleventh edition of which will take place in Seattle next week. Having learned that the way to get me to show up at your conference is to invite me, the TechReady folks invited me to give a talk on advanced debugging techniques. I wasn't their first choice, though. This talk is a ...

Things I've written that have amused other people, Episode 7