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Suppose you had n indistinguishable balls and k distinguishable boxes. Enumerate the ways of distributing the balls into boxes. Some boxes may be empty. We can represent each distribution in the form of n stars and k − 1 vertical lines. The stars represent balls, and the vertical lines divide the balls into boxes. For example, here are the...

Today we're going to debug a hang. Here are some of the (redacted) stacks of the process. I left some red herrings and other frustrations. Since debugging is an exercise in optimism, let's ignore the stacks that didn't come out properly. If we can't make any headway, we can try to fix them, but let's be hopeful that the stacks that are good wil...

A customer was doing some diagnostic work and wanted a way to detect whether the switch was enabled. (Remember that the switch is meaningful only for 32-bit versions of Windows.) The way to detect the setting is to call and look at the . Compile this as a 32-bit program and run it. On 32-bit systems, this reports the system-wide setting...

You might have an application (like a game) where the default touch contact visualizations are a distraction. In WinRT, you can disable the contact visualizations by simply saying In Win32, you use the function. To demonstrate that, let's take our scratch program and make this simple change: The touch visualizations are white and the defau...

Before you ask a question about regular expressions, you should make sure you and your audience agree on which regular expression language you are talking about. Here is a handy table of which features are supported by which regular expression language. You can use that table to solve this customer's problem: I have a regular expression th...

Today's Little Program takes a random walk through MSDN by starting at the page and randomly clicking links. The exercise is not as important as the technique it demonstrates. (I'm assuming the reader can figure out what language this script is written in. If you have to ask, then you probably won't understand this article at all. I am also no...

Today we're going to fill in the following chart: The C++ language specification provides some leeway to implementations on when global static objects are constructed. It can construct the object before begins, or it construct the object on demand according to complicated rules. You can read [basic.start.init] for the gory details. Let's ass...

When a DLL is loaded, it receives a notification, and when it is unloaded (or when the process terminates), it gets a notification. DLLs also receive notifications when a thread is created and notifications when a thread exits. But what if you are an EXE? EXEs don't have a , so there is no way to receive these notifications. The trick here i...

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.