Showing archive results for 2011

You can't.

Stack frames are threaded through EBP.

Originally, the term cadence meant the rate at which a regular event recurs, possibly with variations, but with an overall cycle that repeats. For example, the cadence for team meetings might be "Every Monday, with a longer meeting on the last meeting of each month." Project X is on a six-month release cadence, whereas Project Y takes t...

MaxMax asks a number of resource-related questions, starting with "How do you Unlock a Lock­Resource?" and culminating in "What are the differences between and , , etc.? It would be much easier to use a single function instead of a collection of five." It helps if you understand the history of resources, because the functions were designed b...

There was some apparent uproar because there was an industry which "changed the flavoring of their product depending on which market segment they were trying to appeal to." Well duh, don't all industries do this? The reason why this even remotely qualified as news didn't appear until the last five words of the article!

There are a bunch of different ways of asking the window manager to call you when something interesting happens. Some of them are are in response to things that you explicitly asked for right now. The enumeration functions are classic examples of this. If you call and pass a callback function, then that callback is called directly from the enumera...

We saw earlier the importance of waiting for I/O to complete before freeing the data structures associated with that I/O. On the other hand, before you start waiting, you have to make sure that you have something to wait for. A customer reported a hang in waiting for an I/O to cancel, and the I/O team was brought in to investigate. They looked...

I got seven out of ten right.

Although the x64 calling convention reserves space on the stack as spill locations for the first four parameters (passed in registers), there is no requirement that the spill locations actually be used for spilling. They're just 32 bytes of memory available for scratch use by the function being called. We have a test program that works okay wh...

Code names are rampant at Microsoft. One of the purposes of a code name is to impress upon the people who work with the project that the name is only temporary, and that the final name will come from the marketing folks (who sometimes pull through with a catchy name like Zune, and who sometimes drop the ball with a dud like Bob and who sometimes co...