The guide to trading candy
October 31, 2013Oct 31, 201310/31/13Important information to know this evening.
October 31, 2013Oct 31, 201310/31/13October 31, 2013Oct 31, 201310/31/13If there is no 16-bit emulation layer in 64-bit Windows, how come certain 16-bit installers are allowed to run?
October 31, 2013Oct 31, 201310/31/13Troy Martin is puzzled by the remark in this knowledge base article that says
No 16-bit code can run, except for recognized InstallShield and Acme installers (these are hard-coded in Wow64 to allow them to work).
I agree that the sentence is rather confusingly written.
Distinguishing between asking for help with a product and asking for help with a product's installation
October 30, 2013Oct 30, 201310/30/13Internally at Microsoft, we have a programmer’s tool which I will call Program Q. On the peer-to-peer mailing list for Program Q, somebody asked the following question:
What’s the best way to look at all tables created in the past week? I want to repeat this command across multiple table repositories.
Help me optimize this code which enumerates all possible GUIDs
October 29, 2013Oct 29, 201310/29/13Um, not really.
The financial acumen of sea turtles
October 28, 2013Oct 28, 201310/28/13I dreamed that I was attending some sort of “how to be awesome” seminar where the presenter said, among other things, that a sea turtle, when left to thrive undisturbed, amasses $1 million in personal wealth within one year.
Using GetLogicalProcessorInformationEx to see the relationship between logical and physical processors
October 28, 2013Oct 28, 201310/28/13Today’s Little Program uses the
GetLogicalProcessorInformationEx
function to print the mapping of logical processors to
physical processors,
as well as the mapping of logical processors to packages.
(A dual-core processor is a single package with two cores.
If those cores are themselves dual-hyperthreaded,
My, those threads start up really fast nowadays
October 25, 2013Oct 25, 201310/25/13Here’s a little puzzle
inspired by an actual bug:
// global variable
DWORD g_WorkerThreadId;
bool IsRunningOnWorkerThread()
{
return GetCurrentThreadId() == g_WorkerThreadId;
}
bool LaunchWorkerThread()
{
HANDLE hThread = CreateThread(nullptr, 0,
WorkerThread,
nullptr, 0,
&g_WorkerThreadId);
if (hThread != nullptr) {
CloseHandle(hThread);
return true;
When should I use the FIND_FIRST_EX_LARGE_FETCH flag to FindFirstFileEx?
October 24, 2013Oct 24, 201310/24/13Windows 7 introduces a new flag to the FindFirstFileEx function called FIND_FIRST_EX_LARGE_FETCH. The documentation says that it “uses a larger buffer for directory queries, which can increase performance of the find operation.” This is classic MSDN-style normative documentation: It provides “just the facts”.
It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway: Planting DLLs into directories on the PATH for applications whose current directory is always System32
October 23, 2013Oct 23, 201310/23/13A bunch of security vulnerability reports came in from the same person, all of the form, “Program X is vulnerable to DLL planting if you create a DLL with the name Y in a directory on the PATH,” with varying values of X and Y.
The hierarchy of user education, as interpreted by a vice president
October 22, 2013Oct 22, 201310/22/13One of my colleagues told me a story from his days on the Windows team. He had to give a presentation to his vice president on his feature, and he prepared his presentation and demo obsessively to make sure it went smoothly.