Showing archive results for 2012

I noted to some friends that the weather forecast for Seattle two weekends ago called for rain on Friday, rain on Saturday, and rain on Sunday. But at least on Monday, the forecast was not for rain. It was for heavy rain. One of the consequences of Seattle's annual Rain Festival (runs from January 1 to December 31) is that we get plenty of potent...

Amit wonders how Windows chooses where to place a newly-opened window on a multiple-monitor system and gives as an example an application whose monitor choice appears inconsistent. The easy part is if the application specifies where it wants the window to be. In that case, the window is placed at the requested location. How the application choose...

Today is the traditional start of the holiday shopping season in the United States. If you are thinking of getting something from Williams-Sonoma, Drew Margary has selected a few items of note for your consideration (NSFW: language). (It cracks me up that the model is using the batter dispenser which "measures out uniform circles" to fill a squa...

In addition to specific performance tests run by individual feature teams, Windows has a suite of automated performance tests operated by the performance team, and the results are collated across a lot of metrics. When a number is out of the ordinary, the test results are flagged for further investigation. The obvious thing that the performance me...

A customer was having trouble with nested dialogs. They were doing something very similar to a property sheet, with a main frame dialog, and then a collection of child dialogs that take turns appearing inside the frame dialog based on what the user is doing. The customer found that if they created the child dialogs with the function, everything ...

A security vulnerability report arrived which went roughly like this: When you programmatically enable the XYZ feature, the user receives no visual alert that it is enabled. As a result, malware can enable this feature and use it as part of an attempt to turn the machine into a botnet zombie. The XYZ feature should notify the user when it is enabl...

A customer wanted to know how they could improve the security of USB thumb drives in their organization. Specifically, they wanted to block access to removable media devices (primarily USB thumb drives), but provide a list of exceptions for specific thumb drives. Fortunately, there's a whitepaper that covers exactly this topic and explains how to ...

The verb phrase touch base is in general business jargon use, but it's quite popular at Microsoft. To touch base with someone is to contact someone in a lightweight and mostly-informal sort of way. In other words, it takes the form of a piece of email or a brief office visit rather than a formal meeting with an agenda. Bob, can you touch base w...

Ry Jones wants to know what other podcasts I subscribe to. Remember, I wrote this back in 2011. Here's what I listen to. Note that I am not averse to fast-forwarding over parts that don't interest me, such as when they discuss a movie that I simply don't care about.

The syntax for specifying that requests to import a function from your DLL should be forwarded to another DLL is This says that if somebody tries to call from , they are really calling in . This forwarding is done in the loader. Normally, when a client links to the function , the loader says, "Okay, let me get the address of the function in...