I observed a spill suspiciously close to a three-year-old's play table. I asked, "How did the floor get wet?" She replied, "Water." It's not lying, but it's definitely not telling the whole story. She'll probably grow up to become a lawyer.
While developing tests, a developer observed erratic behavior with respect to : In my test, I call and it fails with . Fair enough, because my test forgot to call . But then I went and checked the production code: In response to a client request, the production code creates a brand new thread to service the request. The brand new thread does ...
The function will tell you when a file was last modified, but it won't tell you who did it. Neither will , , or , or . None of these the file system functions will tell you which user modified a file because the file system doesn't keep track of which user modified a file. But there is somebody who does keep track: The security event log. To ...
A customer asked the following question: We've found that on Windows XP, when we call the XYZ function with the Awesome flag, the function fails for no apparent reason. However, it works correctly on Windows 7. Do you have any ideas about this? So far, the customer has described what they have observed, but they haven't actually asked a...
Ignoring the warnings and then complaining that the bad thing that happens happened.
I dreamed that a friend of mind said, "Between your tenant and your lover, you should get along with at least one of them."
Opportunistic locks allow you to be notified when somebody else tries to access a file you have open. This is usually done if you want to use a file provided nobody else wants it. For example, you might be a search indexer that wants to extract information from a file, but if somebody opens the file for writing, you don't want them to get Sharin...
In London, some of the most expensive real estate is in neighborhoods where relatively few people actually live. According to one company's estimate, 37% of the the residences have been purchased by people who merely use them as vacation homes, visiting only for a week or two per year and leaving the building empty the remainder of the year. In ot...
A customer liaison asked whether it was legal to use to create a parent/child relationship between windows which belong to different processes. "If I remember correctly, the documentation for used to contain a stern warning that it is not supported, but that remark does not appear to be present any more. I have a customer who is reparenting windo...
Microsofties love their acronyms, but you have to remember to send every potential name through a review panel of twelve-year-old boys to identify the lurking embarrassments. When it came time in Windows 7 to come up with the names of the various subteams, two of the proposed names were Core OS eXperience and Find and Use eXperience, using...
