Sure, any noun can be verbed, and any verb can be nouned. But today, we're going to noun an adjective. I have no written citations of this usage; the only report was via a colleague who overheard it in a hallway conversion. I had some offlines with Fred about that. In Microspeak, offline is an adjective which means "outside this meeting." In or...
There is a class of messages which are generated on demand rather than explicitly posted into a message queue. If you call or and the queue is empty, then the window manager will look to see if one of these generated-on-demand messages is due, messages like , , and . Neil wonders, "In that program that called 100,000 times, how many paint messa...
In unix, file descriptors are inherited by child processes by default. This wasn't so much an active decision as it was a consequence of the fork/exec model. To exclude a file descriptor from being inherited by children, you set the flag on the file descriptor. Win32 sort of works like that, but backwards, and maybe a little upside-down. And i...
Today's dubious security vulnerability comes from somebody who reported that the function had a security vulnerability which could lead to arbitrary code execution. This is a serious issue, but reading the report made us wonder if something was missing. According to the report, this sample program illustrates that the function will execute wh...
When there's a piece of mail sent from a senior executive to the entire product team, it tends to follow a set pattern. It starts out with a history of Group X and commends them on what a great job they have been doing. Congratulating Group X is not the actual purpose of the message; it's just part of the template. Once you've seen enough...
I was completing an online gift order for my young nephew's birthday, and I was in the middle of typing Happy birthday into the gift card message when an enthusiastic child reached for the keyboard and held down the "a" key as I typed the final "a" in "birthday". I wanted to capture the spontaneous enthusiasm in the gift tag, but I had no idea wh...
The last time I mentioned programmatic access to SkyDrive was last June, where I noted that the interface was given the confusing name Messenger Connect. At least now they renamed it to Live Connect, which is slightly less confusing. The SkyDrive folks have been pretty busy lately. A few days ago, Dare Obasanjo announced a new Live Connect SDK,...
A customer wanted a way to determine whether a particular window is modal. They listed a few methods they had tried but found that it didn't work and asked for assistance. As Eric Lippert is fond of saying, "First, write your spec." Until you know what you want, you won't know how to get it. First, you need to define what you mean by a modal w...
A customer contacted me to tell a story and ask a question. The customer discovered that in their code base, all calls to passed the flag, regardless of whether the function actually took a long time or not. Their program creates a large number of work items at startup, and the result of passing for all of them was that the thread pool created a...
You're running your program, and then it suddenly exits with the message This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. What happened? That message is printed by the C runtime function , the same function that also causes your program to terminate with exit code 3. Your program might call explicitly, or it m...
