The Old New Thing

What happens when you specify RegexOptions.ECMAScript?

September 16, 2004 Sep 16, 2004 09/16/04

Raymond Chen

The flag changes the behavior of .NET regular expressions. One of the changes I had discussed earlier was with respect to matching digits. For those who want to know more, a summary of the differences is documented in MSDN under the devious title "ECMAScript vs. Canonical Matching Behavior". Apparently some people had trouble finding that...

Interlocked operations don’t solve everything

September 15, 2004 Sep 15, 2004 09/15/04

Raymond Chen

Interlocked operations are a high-performance way of updating DWORD-sized or pointer-sized values in an atomic manner. Note, however, that this doesn't mean that you can avoid the critical section. For example, suppose you have a critical section that protects a variable, and in some other part of the code, you want to update the variable ...

The x86 architecture is the weirdo

September 14, 2004 Sep 14, 2004 09/14/04

Raymond Chen

So unlike all the others, yet people think it's the normal one.

How does Windows exploit hyperthreading?

September 13, 2004 Sep 13, 2004 09/13/04

Raymond Chen

Depends which version of Windows.

Storsjöodjur hunting season will opening soon

September 10, 2004 Sep 10, 2004 09/10/04

Raymond Chen

Scotland doesn't have the corner on monsters in lakes. You'll also find them in Norway, in Sweden (read about a recent expedition), and in Canada, among many, many others. Anywhere there are lakes, there's bound to be a legend about a monster in one of them. It appears, however that Sweden's Storsjöodjur is about to lose its ...

Sometimes the bug isn’t apparent until late in the game

September 10, 2004 Sep 10, 2004 09/10/04

Raymond Chen

I didn't debug it personally, but I know the people who did. During Windows XP development, a bug arrived on a computer game that crashed only after you got to one of the higher levels. After many saved and restored games, the problem was finally identified. The program does its video work in an offscreen buffer and transfers it to ...

Why isn’t the original window order always preserved when you undo a Show Desktop?

September 9, 2004 Sep 9, 2004 09/9/04

Raymond Chen

A commenter asked why the original window order is not always preserved when you undo a Show Desktop. The answer is "Because the alternative is worse." Guaranteeing that the window order is restored can result in Explorer hanging. When the windows are restored when you undo a Show Desktop, Explorer goes through and asks each window ...

Why is the page size on ia64 8KB?

September 8, 2004 Sep 8, 2004 09/8/04

Raymond Chen

It's a balance between performance and performance.

What about Steve?

September 7, 2004 Sep 7, 2004 09/7/04

Raymond Chen

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...

Converting a byte[] to a System.String

September 7, 2004 Sep 7, 2004 09/7/04

Raymond Chen

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 ...