{"id":31223,"date":"2006-05-12T10:00:10","date_gmt":"2006-05-12T10:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2006\/05\/12\/when-people-mimic-the-display-rather-than-the-actual-data\/"},"modified":"2006-05-12T10:00:10","modified_gmt":"2006-05-12T10:00:10","slug":"when-people-mimic-the-display-rather-than-the-actual-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20060512-10\/?p=31223","title":{"rendered":"When people mimic the display rather than the actual data"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recall a bug that we were investigating that was being caused by a registry key being set when it shouldn&#8217;t have been. But when you looked at the key in Regedit, it say &#8220;(value not set)&#8221;. Why were we going down the &#8220;value is set&#8221; branch? A little spelunking with the debugger revealed the reason directly: Whoever set up that registry key wrote the literal string &#8220;(value not set)&#8221; to the registry! Thus, the value <strong>was<\/strong> set, to the string &#8220;(value not set)&#8221;!\n We were flabbergasted. The only explanation we could come up with was that whoever created the registry key didn&#8217;t understand that the &#8220;(value not set)&#8221; was shown by Regedit for a key with no value. Instead, they figured &#8220;Oh, I need it to look like that, so I&#8217;ll set the value to &#8216;(value not set)&#8217;. Now it looks right in Regedit.&#8221;\n Along similar lines, I&#8217;ve been told of a system which appeared to have two (Default) values. As you can probably guess by now, what really happened is that somebody created a value whose name was &#8220;(Default)&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p> The moral of the story is not to confuse what something is with what something looks like. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recall a bug that we were investigating that was being caused by a registry key being set when it shouldn&#8217;t have been. But when you looked at the key in Regedit, it say &#8220;(value not set)&#8221;. Why were we going down the &#8220;value is set&#8221; branch? A little spelunking with the debugger revealed the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-31223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>I recall a bug that we were investigating that was being caused by a registry key being set when it shouldn&#8217;t have been. But when you looked at the key in Regedit, it say &#8220;(value not set)&#8221;. Why were we going down the &#8220;value is set&#8221; branch? A little spelunking with the debugger revealed the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}