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Commenter Andrej Budja asks why cmd.exe is not themed in Windows XP. (This question was repeated by Serge Wautier, proving that nobody checks whether their suggestion has already been submitted before adding their own. It was also asked by a commenter who goes by the name "S", and then repeated again just a few hours later, which proves ag...

In my mailbox yesterday arrived a few complimentary copies of the Japanese translation of my book. (Note: Still available in English.) I cracked the Japanese edition open and confirmed what I already knew: I can't read a lick of Japanese. But now I know how you all feel when you read this Web site: It's page after page of text that makes no sen...

Somebody asked our team for help because they believed they hit a deadlock in their program's UI. (It's unclear why they asked our team, but I guess since our team uses the window manager, and their program uses the window manager, we're all in the same boat. You'd think they'd ask the window manager team for help.) But it turns out that solving...

At Microsoft, there is an obsession with measurement. If you can't measure it, then it doesn't exist. As a result, we set up data collection mechanisms, and try to interpret that data, even if the data isn't what we're really interested in, but we act as if it is. Because it's what we know how to do. (If all you have is a hammer...) A classic exam...

Ever so often, somebody sends me a book, and most of the time I glance through it and say, "Eh." But not this time. Advanced Windows Debugging will make you the envy of your friends (if your friends are computer nerds). Even the section with the "Oh come on every moron knows this already" title Basic Debugger Tasks has stuff that I didn't know. ...

In the category of dubious vulnerability, I submit the following (paraphrased) report: If I call the function, I can cause a buffer overflow exception if I provide an insertion that is more than 2000 characters long. The function in Windows NT, 2000 and XP used the dynamically expanding buffer technique to allocate memory for the re...

Why does the Welcome screen beep if you hit the space bar after the computer has finished starting up? For compatibility with a side effect of the Windows XP Welcome screen. A beta tester asked us why we removed the beeps that were generated if you started typing at the Welcome screen after the computer finished starting up. Well, we didn't ...

Take a shortcut to the command prompt or some other Windows component, right-click it, and select "Run as Administrator." The "Start in" directory from the shortcut is ignored and you are always dropped into the system directory. Why is the starting directory ignored? To avoid a category of attacks (current directory attacks). According to the d...

I've been informed that the Redmond branch of the Microsoft Company Store has begun stocking the dead tree edition of my book. "But wait, your program isn't printed by Microsoft Press; it's published by Addison-Wesley Professional. I thought the company store only stocked Microsoft Press titles." I'm told that this is a pilot program. (And no, I...

For good or ill, email is the most heavily used communication system at Microsoft, so much so that most people at Microsoft are known by their email addresses, sometimes more so than by their legal names! For example, most everybody at Microsoft knows Stephen Toulouse by his email address, "stepto" (pronounced as if it were spelled "steptoe"). No...