Dev Blogs
Anon wants to know why I am listed in the credits for the video game Quake under the "Special Thanks" section. "Were you an early tester/debugger?" I've never played a game of Quake in my entire life. I (and most of the rest of the Windows 95 team) played DOOM, but after a while, first-person-shooter games started giving me a headache. By ...
I noted some time ago that real-mode Windows had to do all its memory management without any hardware assistance. And yet, along the way, they managed to implement an LRU-based discard algorithm. Gabe is really interested in how that was done. As we saw a few months ago, inter-segment calls were redirected through a little stub which either ju...
If you type SysFader into your favorite search engine, you'll find lots of hits from people asking, "What is SysFader, and why is it always crashing Internet Explorer?" The exception unknown software exception (0xe06d7363) occurred in the application at location 0x7c812afb. OK Cancel When a...
There are a bunch of functions that allow you to manipulate the address space of other processes, like and . Of what possible legitimate use could they be? Why would one process need to go digging around inside the address space of another process, unless it was up to no good? These functions exist for debuggers. For example, when you ask the deb...
Every year, Microsoft invites its employees to fill out a poll which asks questions regarding all sorts of things. One of the things Microsoft employees are asked to evaluate is whether they think that their vice president is acting planfully. The tricky part about that question is that nobody knows exactly what the word planfully means. Merriam...
Clipboarder Gadget wants to know why the desktop is treated so special in window ordering. Specifically, when you double-click a folder icon on the desktop, and the immediately close it, why does focus not go back to the desktop? Instead it goes to some random window. Actually, it's the other way around. Focus is going to a random window specific...
Long-time observers are familiar with Contoso, the fake company name used in Microsoft samples and demonstrations. The Windows Phone folks have started running with the joke and creating their own line of Contoso-branded merchandise. (Of course, if you get the Contoso mug, you should fill it with Fourth Coffee.)
Crack open open the champagne: Batch File Week is finally over! Variations on the will let you repeat an operation on the contents of a directory, possibly even recursively if you add the option, with some basic attribute-level filtering if you add the or /a- flags. For your fancy recursive file operations, there's a tool called which iter...
It may be possible based on your location to view what NBC euphemistically calls "highlights" from the women's badminton doubles match between China's Yu Yang/Wang Xiaoli and South Korea's Jung Kyung Eun/Kim Ha Na. The serves go laughably into the net, there is barely any attempt to chase down shots, and returns go far out of bounds. If this is top...
Prepare your party hats: Batch File Week is almost over. In your batch file, you may want to exit batch file processing (say, you encountered an error and want to give up), but if you use the command, that will exit the entire command processor. Which is probably not what you intended. Batch file processing ends when execution reaches the end...