Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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The Seattle Monorail has two trains, and they collided

July 28th, 2006
Murphy's Law vindicated again. The Seattle Monorail has two trains, and last year they managed to collide. To get this to happen was particularly tricky, since the trains run on separate tracks, and there is only one spot on the entire line where a collision could occur—and they found it. You can read about it in this Associated Press ...

The efficiency of ordinal-based imports while still being name-based

July 28th, 2006
Reader Tom brought up the interesting point that ordinal-based imports are slightly faster than name-based, though not by much. But if even that tiny fraction of a percentage bothers you, you can still get the benefits of ordinal-based imports while still being name-based. People are more familiar with the first half of the "rebase and bind...

Handy tip: If you're going to break into vehicles, the police vehicle service center is probably a bad place

July 27th, 2006
And you probably shouldn't fall asleep in the van you break into...

Index to the series on DLL imports and exports

July 27th, 2006
For reference.

Names in the import library are decorated for a reason

July 27th, 2006
When I wrote that the symbolic name for the imported function table entry for a function is called , the statement was "true enough" for the discussion at hand, but the reality is messier, and the reason for the messy reality is function name decoration. When a naive compiler generates a reference to a function, the reference is decorated in...

Real Madrid (i.e., proper football) comes to Seattle

July 26th, 2006
Hot off the presses. Real Madrid (with David Beckham, Ronaldo, and other stars) will play an exhibition match against D. C. United in Seah^H^H^H^HQuest Field on Wednesday, August 9th. I wonder if it'll be anything like the last soccer match I saw. At least let's hope they're ready to play instead of having tired themselves out playing ...

What happens when you get dllimport wrong?

July 26th, 2006
Now that we've learned what the declaration specifier does, what if you get it wrong? If you forget to declare a function as , then you're basically making the compiler act like a naive compiler that doesn't understand . When the linker goes to resolve the external reference for the function, it will use the stub from the import library, and...

If you know German, the world is, well, slightly more confusing

July 25th, 2006
While it may be true that if you know Swedish, the world is funnier, I have to admit that my knowledge of German only served to create momentary confusion. When I saw the headline that the head of BetonSports was arrested, I thought to myself, "Who the heck would have a web site devoted to sports in concrete?" That's because the German word...

Issues related to forcing a stub to be created for an imported function

July 25th, 2006
I noted last time that you can concoct situations that force the creation of a stub for an imported function. For example, if you declare a global function pointer variable: then the C compiler is forced to generate the stub and assign the address of the stub to the variable. That's the best it can do, since the loader will patch up only...

Raise la lanterne rouge

July 24th, 2006
Sure, everybody knows that Floyd Landis won this year's Tour de France. But what about the guy who came in last? While the race leader wears the maillot jaune (yellow jersey), the person at the bottom of the pack is saddled with the lanterne rouge (red lantern), after the lamp that hangs on the back of a train. This year's "winner" is Wim ...