Showing archive results for 2011

A customer requested assistance with their shell namespace extension, and the request worked its way to me for resolution. The customer was at a loss because the customer's code was nowhere on the stack. What is wrong? The customer didn't provide a dump file or any other information beyond the stack trace. (Hint: When reporting a problem with...

Resources in PE-format files must be stored at offsets which are a multiple of four. This requirement is necessary for platforms which are sensitive to data alignment. That doesn't stop people from breaking the rules anyway. After all, it sort of works anyway, as long as you're careful. I mean, sure maybe if somebody running a non-x86 version of W...

The Operations group at Microsoft manage the servers which keep the company running. And they have their own jargon which is puzzling to those of us who don't spend all our days in a noisy server room. From what I can gather, an Unplanned Outage would be better termed an Unscheduled Outage: We did not have it marked off on our calendar that the ...

There is a server run by the Windows team called . Its purpose is to act as a file server for storing files temporarily. For example, if you want to send somebody a crash dump, you can copy it to the scratch server and send the person a link. The file server is never backed up and is not designed to be used as a permanent solution for anything. T...

Commenter Josh points out that Group Policy settings often employ double-negatives (and what's the difference between turning something off and not configuring it)? Group Policy settings are unusual in that they are there to modify behavior that would continue to exist without them. They aren't part of the behavior but rather a follow-on. Suppose...

This scenarios is real, but details have been changed to protect the guilty. Consider a window showing the top of a multi-page document. The developers found that when the user clicks the down-arrow button on the scroll bar, the program locks up for 45 seconds, over a dozen threads are created, and then suddenly everything clears up and the wind...

For quite some time, Windows has had a setting officially called active window tracking but which informally goes by the name X-Mouse, because that was the name of the PowerToy which first exposed the feature. (The PowerToy was in turn so-named because it made the mouse behave in a manner similar to many X window managers.) The setting is exposed ...

A customer wanted to prevent users from pinning their application to the taskbar. I have an application that is launched as a helper by a main application. Users shouldn't be launching it directly, but rather should be launching the main application. But since the helper shows up in the taskbar, users may be tempted to right-click on the taskbar...

I found it amusing that somebody considered the fact that Microsoft employees can read my queued-up blog entries before the articles are published to be further evidence of Microsoft's evil essence as a monopoly. Just for the record, this is not evidence of Microsoft's evil essence as a monopoly. Rather, it's evidence of Raymond's evil essence a...

Names from around the world.