It's a balance between performance and performance.

The Annals of Improbable Research highlighted a few days ago the pioneering work of researcher Eugenie C. Scott on The Morphology of Steve. The value of these results to the growing field of Steve Theory cannot be understated...

For some reason, this question gets asked a lot. How do I convert a byte[] to a System.String? (Yes, this is a CLR question. Sorry.) You can use String System.Text.UnicodeEncoding.GetString() which takes a byte[] array and produces a string. Note that this is not the same as just blindly copying the bytes from the byte[] array into a hunk of ...

Perhaps not as well-known today as it was in the days when the arrow keys and numeric keypad shared space is that the shift key overrides NumLock. If NumLock is on (as it usually is), then pressing a key on the numeric keypad while holding the shift key overrides NumLock and instead generates the arrow key (or other navigation key) printed in ...

Apparently there are a lot of strange dictionaries out there. Otherwise-well-respected German dictionary publisher Langenscheidt announced that it is producing a German-Woman/Woman-German dictionary. (Psst, Toronto Star, it's "Also sprachen die Fräulein"... Third person plural, past tense of strong verb, ending is "en". You're welcome...

Einstein discovered that simultaneity is relative. This is also true of computing. People will ask, "Is it okay to do X on one thread and Y on another thread simultaneously?" Here are some examples: You can answer this question knowing nothing about the internal behavior of those operations. All you need to know are some physics and the ...

Even though Windows NT uses UTC internally, the BIOS clock stays on local time. Why is that? There are a few reasons. One is a chain of backwards compatibility. In the early days, people often dual-booted between Windows NT and MS-DOS/Windows 3.1. MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 operate on local time, so Windows NT followed ...

For some reason, some people go to enormous lengths to locate the Internet Explorer binary so they can launch it with some options. The way to do this is not to do it. If you just pass "IEXPLORE.EXE" to the ShellExecute function [link fixed 9:41am], it will go find Internet Explorer and run it. ShellExecute(NULL, "open", "iexplore.exe...

In an earlier article, I gave an example of reading a contract from the other side. Here's another example of how you can read a specification and play the role of the operating system. I chose this particular example because somebody wanted to do this and didn't realize that everything they needed was already documented; they just needed to look...

The various Interlocked functions (InterlockedIncrement, and so on) require that the variable being updated be properly aligned, even on x86, a platform where the CPU silently fixes unaligned memory access invisibly. If you pass an unaligned pointer to one of the Interlocked functions, the operation will still succeed, but the result won't be ...