{"id":99995,"date":"2018-10-17T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-10-17T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=99995"},"modified":"2019-03-13T00:22:11","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T07:22:11","slug":"20181017-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20181017-00\/?p=99995","title":{"rendered":"What does the “Ae” stand for in AeDebug?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The name of the registry key for configuring automatic debugging of application crashes is AeDebug<\/a>. Okay, so it’s obvious what “Debug” stands for, but what does “Ae” stand for? <\/p>\n

I can’t prove it, but circumstantial evidence points to AE standing for “Application Error”. The title of the dialog box was originally “Application Error”. And there’s this comment: <\/p>\n

\n\/\/ This fixes the AE (application error) in component XYZ\n<\/pre>\n
This evidence lines up with 16-bit Windows, where application crashes were originally called Unrecoverable Application Errors, or UAEs. <\/p>\n
So that’s what I’m going to say. It stands for Application Error. <\/p>\n
Bonus chatter<\/b>: The procedure¹ in 16-bit Windows that displayed the Unrecoverable Application Error dialog was named Display_Box_of_Doom<\/code> and it has the understated comment “Display the Unrecoverable Application Error box that everyone seems to dislike so much.” Later, the name of the dialog changed to simply “Application Error”: We gave you a way to try to recover from it<\/a>, so it wasn’t “unrecoverable” any more. <\/p>\n
¹ Note that I called it a “procedure” rather than a “function”. That’s because it, like most of the 16-bit kernel, was written in assembly language. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m not sure, but I think it’s Application Error.<\/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":[2],"class_list":["post-99995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"
I’m not sure, but I think it’s Application Error.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99995","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=99995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99995\/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=99995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}