Showing tag results for Code

The function returns a pseudo-handle to the current thread. The documentation goes into significant detail on what this means, but I fear that it may have fallen into the trap of providing so much documentation that people decide to skip it. Okay, so first of all, what is a pseudo-handle? a pseudo-handle is a sentinel value for that is not r...

Walking the tree.

When I wrote about asking the compiler to answer calling convention questions, some people were concerned about whether this was a reliable mechanism or whether it was relying on something that can change in the future. This is a special case of the question, "What parts of an interface can change, and what can't?" And it all boils down to comp...

When I discussed the conventions for managing standard handles, Sven2 noted that I implied that you need to call with a new handle if you close the current handle and asked "Wouldn't it make more sense to call it the other way round? I.e., first set the new handle, then close the old one? It would ensure that any other thread that runs in paralle...

This whole enumeration nightmare-miniseries started off with Stirling numbers of the second kind. But what about Stirling numbers of the first kind? Those things ain't gonna enumerate themselves! The traditional formulation of the recursion for Stirling numbers of the first kind (unsigned version, since it's hard to enumerate negative numbers)...

The exception code (and its doppelgänger ) is raised, naturally enough, when the denominator of an integer division is zero. The x86 and x64 processors also raise this exception when you divide by , or more generally, when the result of a division does not fit in the destination. The division instructions for those processors take a 2N-bit...

A customer reported that the appeared to be unreliable. We have two threads, one that waits on an event and the other that signals the event. But we found that sometimes, signaling the event does not wake up the waiting thread. We have to signal it twice. What are the conditions under which will ignore a signal? // cleanup and error checkin...

Today's Little Program simulates pressing the Play/Pause button on your fancy keyboard. This might be useful if you want to write a program that converts some other input (say, gesture detection) into media controller events. One way of doing this is to take advantage of the function, since the default behavior for the message is to pass the m...

I left an exercise at the end of last week's article: "Why is the error raised only sometimes?" COM subscribes to the principle that if no marshaling is needed, then an interface pointer points directly at the object with no COM code in between. If the current thread is running in a single-threaded apartment, and it creates a COM object with t...

A customer was observing strange mutex ownership behavior. They had two processes that used a mutex to coordinate access to some shared resource. When the first process crashed while owning the mutex, they found that the second process somehow magically gained ownership of that mutex. Specifically, when the first process crashed, the second proces...