The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Most people who go to an open house aren't actually interested in buying it
You have a house for sale. You hold an open house. But not everybody who attends is there because they're interested in buying the house. The first wave are neighbors who are curious about the house they've seen for years only from the outside. Then there are the people who just enjoy looking at other people's houses. And occasionally, people drop by looking for chicken wings.
If you're handling an out of memory exception, you probably shouldn't allocate memory
With the assistance of Application Verifier, specifically, low resource simulation (also known as fault injection), a tester found a stack overflow condition. As we learned earlier, the important thing to look at when studying a stack overflow is the repeating section. When this stack trace was shown to the development team, they instantly recognized the cause of the problem. And you also have enough information to figure it out, too. Hint: Of the most likely reasons that a method named would throw an error, which of them match the scenario? Since we are simulating low resources, the error being thrown...
Start with a $50,000 grant, hold a fundraiser, lose $47,000
Phase three: Not profit. Coolidge High School received a $50,000 grant from AOL Time Warner to help keep the school computer systems running. Add a bizarre and disastrous fundraiser run by a confessed fraudster, and the next thing you know, nearly all of the money vanished before the year was out.
Management-speak: Focus
Management likes to use the word focus. They like it so much, that anything important is called a focus. That's an interesting scenario, one which we hope to address, but it's not our main focus. We're focusing on three features for this release. But how can you focus on more than one thing? The first citation implies that there's more than one focus (a main focus, and maybe some secondary foci); the second citation makes explicit the mutiplicity of foci. But a lens doesn't focus on more than one thing. There is one focus, the point at which parallel rays from infinity converge. Then again, if a lens is de...
Hey, you look Chinese, we have a class for people like you
(The title is a callback to this article from a few months ago.) A member of my extended family grew up near the city of Nanaimo, Canada. While it's true that she's ethnically Chinese, it's also true that she's a fourth generation Canadian. The community is overwhelmingly English-speaking, and English is her first language. She grew up going to an English-language school, she watched English-language television, spoke English with her friends and family, and probably dreamed dreams in English. Yet when the family moved to Vancouver when she was a child (I don't know the exact age, so let's say eight years old...
When you agree to write to a particular length, make sure your content is actually that length
Your editor has a magazine to fill.
Why are developer tools orange?
The Secret Geek Leon Bambrick wonders why developer tools are orange. Coincidence? Worldwide conspiracy?
Things other people have written that have amused me, Episode 2
Somebody posted a time-saving tip and concluded with "You'll save yourself at least 5 minutes per year." I jokingly wrote back, "I already do XYZ which does this automatically, and besides, saving 5 minutes per year isn't much anyway. I spend that much time picking my nose." The response: "Yeah, but now you can do both nostrils."
Thanks for identifying the good programmers for us
Many years ago, my manager told me about a recruiting trip he made. In response to a large number of job applications submitted from a city where a major competing software company had its offices, a small group of Microsofties travelled to that city to interview those applicants and hold a mini-job fair, so that other interested parties could also show up and interview for positions. When the company learned that Microsoft was coming to interview people, they called an emergency meeting which all their top programmers were required to attend, timing it to coincide with the job fair. The theory must have been th...