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When you're debugging, you might have a pointer to a COM interface and want to know what the underlying object is. Now, sometimes this trick won't work because the interface pointer actually points to a stub or proxy, but in the case where no marshalling is involved, it works great. (This technique also works for many C++ compilers for any object ...

You may be called in to study a problem in code you've never seen before or be asked to look over a proposed change to some code you've never seen before. When this happens, you have to take shortcuts in your analysis because following every function call to the bottom would not only take far too much time, but also take you so far away from the c...

About every ten months, somebody new discovers the Notepad file encoding problem. Let's see what else there is to say about it. First of all, can we change Notepad's detection algorithm? The problem is that there are a lot of different text files out there. Let's look just at the ones that Notepad supports. 8-bit ANSI (of which 7-bit ASCII is...

As I noted some time ago, it's hard to get programmers excited about power management. What's worse, programs that do take the effort to care about power management often do it rudely, hijacking your computer and preventing you from going into standby or hibernation, instead preferring to drain your battery until the computer just dies from lack ...

Design for readability. Even if you don't intend anybody else to read your code, there's still a very good chance that somebody will have to stare at your code and figure out what it does: That person is probably going to be you, twelve months from now. When I advised against the use of function parameters, one commenter pointed out that Intel...

Last summer, one of my colleagues thought it would be fun to have an informal "lunch chat with Raymond" as a special treat for our summer interns. One of the interns reacted to the invitation a bit unexpectedly, asking meekly, "Is he going to yell at us?"

There are two ways to make a vertical toolbar. You can use the common style, or you can use the extended style which is specific to the toolbar. Why are there two ways of doing the same thing? Because we messed up. Whoever created the extended style didn't realize that there was already a perfectly good way of specifying a vertical toolbar (na...

Many years ago, I saw a Dilbert cartoon that went roughly like this. Frame 1: Supertitle - "Dogbert's guide to project management." Frame 2: Supertitle - "Not a project." Dilbert answers the phone. "Sure, we do that." Frame 3: Supertitle - "A project." Dilbert answers the phone. "No, we don't do that."† I've seen a lot of software projects, ...

A customer asked the following question (paraphrased): Does the Windows XP Add/Remove Programs control panel expose a scriptable object model? We want our program to open the Add/Remove Programs control panel and uninstall the programs of our competitors. No, there is no object model for the Add and Remove Programs control panel, and it fri...