The Old New Thing

When you transfer control across stack frames, all the frames in between need to be in on the joke

Chris Hill suggests discussing the use of structured exception handling as it relates to the window manager, and specifically the implications for applications which raise exceptions from a callback. If you plan on raising an exception and handling it in a function higher up the stack, all the stack frames in between need to be be in on ...

The case of the asynchronous copy and delete

A customer reported some strange behavior in the and functions. They were able to reduce the problem to a simple test program, which went like this (pseudocode): When they ran the program, they found that sometimes the copy failed on the first try with error 5 () but if they waited a second and tried again, it succeeded. Similarly, ...

You can't rule out a total breakdown of normal functioning, because a total breakdown of normal functioning could manifest itself as anything

A customer was attempting to study a problem that their analysis traced back to the function returning . Is it a valid conclusion that there is no heap corruption? While heap corruption may not be the avenue of investigation you'd first pursue, you can't rule it out. In the presence of a total breakdown of normal functioning, anything can...

How did the X-Mouse setting come to be?

Commenter HiTechHiTouch wants to know whether the "X-Mouse" feature went through the "every request starts at −100 points filter", and if so, how did it manage to gain 99 points? The X-Mouse feature is ancient and long predates the "−100 points" rule. It was added back in the days when a developer could add a random rogue ...