What happens when you tell a Millennial to take pictures of a party
I was a speaker at an internal Microsoft conference for field technical people, I offered my attendee party ticket to my team because I was unable to attend myself. My instructions to the person who...
View ArticleThe case of the 32-bit program that tries to load a 64-bit DLL
One of our escalation engineers wrote up an epic case study of a particular problem that he was able to solve. I'll retell the story here, but redacted, and significantly abbreviated. A customer...
View ArticleSome internal developer chatter on a bug that caused your screen to turn black
There was a bug in an internal build of Windows (let's call it build N) where if you were sufficiently unlucky, your screen would turn black and get stuck that way. The team responsible for the bug...
View ArticleMicrospeak: to reason over
Today's Microspeak is the phrase reason over. This API allows you to reason over the objects and relationships contained in the schema model generated by DACFx. To get value out of that data, we must...
View ArticleHow do we improve the performance of conhost processes when we ping a bunch...
A customer had a program that launches many instances of the ping program in order to check the availability of a large number of servers. They found that each copy of ping comes with a copy of...
View ArticleHow do I keep thread pool threads, or other threads in general, from...
Processor affinity lets you specify which processor or processors a thread can run on. This works for threads you control, but what about threads you don't control? Consider a game. You want your...
View ArticleIs GENERIC_ALL equivalent to GENERIC_READ | GENERIC_WRITE | GENERIC_EXECUTE?
A customer wanted to know whether passing GENERIC_ALL as an access mask is effectively equivalent to passing GENERIC_READ | GENERIC_WRITE | GENERIC_EXECUTE. Specifically, they were interested in the...
View ArticleWhich languages are fully-localized by Windows?
A little while ago, I discussed that not all languages get translated console output. For reference, here are the languages that are fully-localized, including console output: Lang Description de-DE...
View ArticleRaymond’s highly scientific predictions for the 2017 NCAA men’s basketball...
It's been a few years since the last time, but it's back: Raymond comes up with an absurd, arbitrary criterion for filling out his NCAA bracket. This year, I base it on the average attendance of the...
View ArticleWhy is Alt+D the keyboard shortcut for putting focus on the address bar?
The keyboard shortcut for putting focus on the address bar in Explorer and Internet Explorer (and Edge and the version of Internet Explorer that came with Windows 8 that nobody talks about even though...
View ArticleHow do I show the sharing pane from a Win32 desktop application?
A customer wanted to show the sharing pane from their Win32 desktop application. In a UWP application, this would be done by calling...
View ArticleHow do I provide data to the sharing pane from a Win32 desktop application?
Last time, we were able to show the sharing pane from a Win32 desktop application, but we didn't provide any information to the sharing pane, so all it did was offer to share a screen shot. Today,...
View ArticleIf I want to maintain a free list of pages, should I use MEM_RESET or...
A customer had a memory-intensive application, and one of the things they do to avoid address space fragmentation is to maintain a list of recently-freed memory and satisfying future allocations from...
View ArticleNot interested in college basketball? No problem. Follow the Name of the Year...
Name of the Year celebrates people with great names. In the 2016 final, Pope McCorkle III, defeated Sweet Orefice with a 5% margin of victory. The year before that: Amanda Miranda Panda defeated...
View ArticleHappy St. Patrick’s Day. Watch out for that throne.
North Bend is a small town about a half-hour's drive from Seattle, perhaps best known as one of the cities which provided shooting locations for the cult television show Twin Peaks. Earlier this...
View ArticleSecret passages on Microsoft main campus, episode 2
As with most "secret passages" on campus, they aren't actually secret, but they are handy and not well known. If you are trying to walk to the Building 43 cafeteria from the southwest, the usual route...
View ArticleWhy does the volume control let me set the volume only to even numbers?
When you use the hardware button or the dedicated multimedia keyboard button to increase or decrease the volume, the resulting volume is always an even number. If the volume was 22 and you increase...
View ArticleYou can peek to see whether your delay-loaded function loaded successfully
The QueryOptionalDelayLoadedAPI function lets you ask whether a function marked as delay-loaded was in fact found. Here's a tiny demonstration: #include <windows.h> #include...
View ArticleResponses to various ideas on how to get people to stop using that leaked build
Some time ago, I told the story of how we used psychology to get people to stop using a leaked build and upgrade to a newer build. People had suggestsions for other ways this could have been done. One...
View ArticleWhen you submit a security vulnerability report, we go the extra mile and try...
A security vulnerability report arrived that went like this: Create the folder C:\Folder and grant full control to authenticated users. Create the subfolder C:\Folder\bar. Create the files...
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