July 30, 2010Jul 30, 201007/30/10Special 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.
July 29, 2010Jul 29, 201007/29/10I 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.
July 29, 2010Jul 29, 201007/29/10Some 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.
July 28, 2010Jul 28, 201007/28/10I 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.
July 27, 2010Jul 27, 201007/27/10I 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.
July 26, 2010Jul 26, 201007/26/10Commenter 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,
July 23, 2010Jul 23, 201007/23/10Unless 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?),
July 23, 2010Jul 23, 201007/23/10Some 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 whether the pointer
is valid).
July 22, 2010Jul 22, 201007/22/10Microsoft 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.
July 22, 2010Jul 22, 201007/22/10A customer asked for advice on how to accomplish something, the details of which are not important, except to say that what they were trying to do was far more complicated than the twenty-word summary would suggest. And I wasn’t convinced that it was a good idea,
