Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

October 2005 - Posts

What's wrong with this code, part 15 - the answers

Well, that was certainly interesting. My last "what's wrong with this code" post had to do with a real-world bug in some of the notification infrastructure that's used for audio. I took some sample code done while developing the prototype, and stripped Read More...
Posted Monday, October 31, 2005 10:34 AM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments

Another Surreal moment

I was listening to NPR while driving around this afternoon. They had a report by Libby Lewis on "Scooter" Libby. Somewhere over in NPR-land, there is a producer that is just laughing his socks off. I don't know how on EARTH they managed to arrange a Libby Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 29, 2005 5:58 PM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part 15

Work's been pretty hectic lately, that's why so few posts this month, but I ran into a real bug in my code recently that I realized would make a GREAT "What's wrong with this code" post. HRESULT CNotification::GenerateEvent ( PNOTIFICATION_BLOCK NotificationBlock Read More...
Posted Friday, October 28, 2005 1:49 PM by LarryOsterman | 37 Comments

Does Visual Studio make you stupid?

I know everyone's talking about this, but it IS a good question... Charles Petzold recently gave this speech to the NYC .NET users group. I've got to say, having seen Daniel's experiences with Visual Basic, I can certainly see where Charles is coming Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 26, 2005 4:18 PM by LarryOsterman | 40 Comments

A really quick followup to the "No Easter Eggs" story

Man, it's just been the fall for running into old friends and colleagues. In the past month alone, I've run into three different classmates from college, and co-workers from over the years. Go figure that one out, I have NO idea why they all caught up Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 22, 2005 2:01 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

Why no Easter Eggs?

Yesterday's post caused a bit of a furor in the comments thread. A large number of people leaving comments (and others ) didn't understand why the OS division has a "no Easter Eggs" policy. If you think about this, it's not really that surprising. One Read More...
Posted Friday, October 21, 2005 2:47 PM by LarryOsterman | 32 Comments

Early Easter Eggs

Jensen Harris's blog post today talked about an early Easter Egg he found in the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer BASIC interpreter. What's not widely known is that there were Easter Eggs in MS-DOS. Not many, but some did slip in. The earliest one I Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 20, 2005 9:56 AM by LarryOsterman | 53 Comments

Activate-As-Activator activates as activator

This particular problem burned my team somewhat the other day, so I figured writing a blog post about the issue was a good thing. When you activate a COM object (with CoCreateInstance), one of the things that COM has to do is to figure out the activation Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 18, 2005 1:57 PM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments
Filed under:

Unintended consequences of adding APIs to the system

Yesterday, I wrote about a trick to reduce the number of bits in a number by one. It turns out that I've only ever had one opportunity to use this trick (although I ran into an instance of it when code reviewing some stuff the other day), back when I Read More...
Posted Friday, October 14, 2005 10:10 AM by LarryOsterman | 31 Comments

Another of my favorite tricks - reducing the number of bits in a number by 1

One of the classic (and thus no longer asked) Microsoft interview questions is "How quickly can you count the bits in a 16 (or 32) bit integer?". You get a varied number of responses to this one, from brute force to lookup tables. One of my favorite tricks Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 13, 2005 1:16 PM by LarryOsterman | 35 Comments

It's on the whiteboard

Way back when, when we were first shipping NT 3.1, checking files into the source tree was pretty easy. You made your changes and checked them in. Not a big deal, since there were only 20 or so people working on the code base - the chances of collision Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 12, 2005 1:59 PM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

Looking under rocks...

I've really been enjoying Jensen Harris's blog recently, he's been talking about the UI design that went into Office 12. Today's post (on turning over rocks) is no different, reading it brought a smile to my face, mostly because of this paragraph: I don't Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 11, 2005 10:19 AM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

Does __fastcall make a difference for C++ classes?

We're running through a routine round of code reviews of the audio engine, and I noticed the following code (obscured): HRESULT __fastcall CSomeClass::SomeMethod(SomeParameters); I looked at it a couple of times, because it seemed like it was wrong. The Read More...
Posted Monday, October 10, 2005 11:56 AM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments
Filed under:

Setting volume on audio CDs with MCI

So I got an email from a reader yesterday asking: How do you set the volume of an audio stream coming from a CD? I found an old piece of code that used mciSendCommand with some parameters to do so, but my compiler cannot find the "MCI_SET_VOLUME" constant. Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 06, 2005 9:30 AM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments

Sorry for the lack of technical stuff recently...

I've been swamped with work, and all the reviewers for the Vista audio posts haven't gotten back to me (you know who you are :)) so I've lagged behind (yes, the Vista audio stuff is being reviewed by others, it's important that the posts be accurate). Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 06, 2005 9:05 AM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments

I don't know if I should be honored or embarassed...

There's this guy, "Jamie" over on Channel9 who's quite skilled with photoshop. One of his ongoing themes is something he calls "Channel9 Park" - it's Microsoft related stories with a South Park theme. Apparently I showed up in todays episode . As I said, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 04, 2005 12:45 PM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments
 
Page view tracker