One frequently-overlooked software "tax" is geopolitics. We've alread seen that the time zone and regional settings dialogs created international unrest. It appears that Google Maps failed to recognize the extremely sensitive issue of naming the body of water that lies between Korea and Japan, as well as stirring up international tensions with ...
One of the taxes I alluded to some time ago when I broached the issues of software development "taxes" is Hierarchical Storage Management. The short description of Hierarchical Storage Management is that it is a way of archiving data transparently. When a file is due for archival, it is transferred to a slower (but less expensive) storage medium,...
Unlike mutexes and critical sections, semaphores don't have owners. They merely have counts. The ReleaseSemaphore function increases the count associated with a semaphore by the specified amount. (This increase might release waiting threads.) But the thread releasing the semaphore need not be the same one that claimed it originally. This is dif...
When I saw a discussion of how to simulate retry via try/catch, using as inspiration a Ruby function that retried a network operation three times before finally giving up, I felt the need to caution against automatic retry. Your natural inclination when faced with a failure that has a good chance of being caused by a transient condition is to re...
Why is there a special PostQuitMessage function? Because it's not really a posted message. Commenter A. Skrobov asked, "What's the difference between and ?" They are not equivalent, though they may look that way at first glance. The differences are subtle but significant. Like the , , and messages, the message is not a "real" posted mess...
Some people believe that the COM rules on interfaces are needlessly strict. But the rules are there for a reason. Suppose you ship some interface in version N of your product. It's an internal interface, not documented to outsiders. Therefore, you are free to change it any time you want without having to worry about breaking compatibility w...
Some time ago, I discussed several timestamp formats you might run into. Today we'll take a logical step from that information and develop a list of special values you might encounter. Note that if you apply time zone adjustments, the actual timestamp may shift by up to a day. All of these special values have one thing in common: If you see them...
Jensen Harris's brief example of using Excel's random number generator reminded me that I had need for the random number generator recently myself: Generating buzzword bingo cards. At the Battlestar Galactica party, our hosts needed to create some Battlestar Galactica-themed buzzword bingo cards and asked me to help out. Here's how I did it: ...
The window manager and GDI objects as a general rule will automatically destroy objects created by a process when that process terminates. (The window manager also destroys windows when their owner threads exit.) Note, however, that this is a safety net and not an excuse for you to leak resources in your own program with the attitude of "Oh, it do...
GDI objects are much simpler. As a general rule, they all have process affinity: They can be used by any thread in the process that created them. If you use a GDI object from multiple threads, it is your responsibility to coordinate the object's use. Note that the window manager and GDI as a general rule keep their respective objects thread-safe....
