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There's no such thing as a free lunch. Or free code either. Many years ago, I wrote some samples for the SDK as a favor, and at each major SDK release, I am reminded that no good deed goes unpunished. I can tell when a major SDK release is coming, because I get a piece of mail that goes something like this: Hi. You are on file as the owner of at...

"The most important choice in writing is not what you say. It's what you don't say." Eric Gunnerson gave me that advice when I was writing my book. It's sort of the writing version of "You don't know what you do until you know what you don't do." That's why I'll write Of course, you probably wonder this magical comes from. It comes from the...

Some suggestion box topics turn into daily entries. Others deserve just a sentence or two. Here are the short answers. Can you shed some light on RPC_E_CANTCALLOUT_ININPUTSYNCCALL? This one is kind of bizarre, because the person who asked the question linked to the answer! What form do application hacks usually take in...

The jargon phrase going forward has largely replaced the more mundane equivalent from now on. It appears that I'm not the only person who is bothered by this phrase. Sample usages: Notice that the phrase going forward usually adds little to the sentence. You can delete it from all of the sentences above and nobody would notice a difference.

In 2006, Christian Buckley set forth on a grand mission: To visit every cafeteria on Microsoft's Redmond campus. This marathon effort went by the name Microsoft Cafeteria Tour 2006, or for those in the know, MSCT2k6. Those looking for off-campus dining options can make use of this map mashup of restaurants which provide discounts to Microsoft em...

David Vronay writes about the difficult balance that has to be maintained between people who like the classic Windows game Minesweeper and people who are (understandably) upset that Windows includes a game about landmines, trivializing a very serious issue. (Yes, the image used in the game is a water mine, not a land mine, but that's scant conso...

If the user chooses to uninstall your program, what do you do with the data your program kept in , and other parts of the user profile? Should you enumerate all the profiles on the machine and clean them up? No. Let the data go. First, messing with the profiles of users that aren't logged on can result in data corruption, as we saw when we look...

Some time ago, the application compatibility folks found a program that was corrupting the heap, and they applied a fix that worked around the specific type of corruption that the program performed. And then a bug came on that same program. It was a heap corruption failure during the program's processing of global destructors. The authors of that...

Yes, it's that time of year again, time for the annual Microsoft Company Meeting, and therefore time for another of Raymond's reminiscences about meetings past. (If you want a report on the meeting itself, I'm sure Mini-Microsoft will oblige. Here's the company meeting preview.) Over a decade ago, one of my colleagues informally organized a bik...

Here's a question that came in from a customer (paraphrased): Hello, we are developing an ASP.NET application and are running into problems with the pop-up blocker introduced in Windows XP Service Pack 2. Where can we get a full description of the rules that control whether a pop-up will be blocked so we can make sure our pop-ups are let...