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January 2007 - Posts

What is AUDIODG.EXE?

One of the new audio components in Vista is a new process named audiodg.exe. If you look at it in taskmgr, the description shows "Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation", but that's not really particularly helpful when it comes to figuring out what it does. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 31, 2007 2:46 PM by LarryOsterman | 41 Comments

Vista Ship Gifts

Our ship gifts for Vista came the other day. We got a fleece pullover and the final DVD for our DVD cube. Fully updated, the cube is a collection of 4 DVDs, containing the bits for Vista Beta1, Vista Beta2, Vista RC1, and Vista RTM. There's also a booklet: Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 30, 2007 11:38 AM by LarryOsterman | 19 Comments

Nostalgia Waxes

So apparently there's something going on today in New York City (I don't know what it is, since I'm not invited :)). However, a couple of weeks ago, someone dug up a piece of Microsoft nostalgia and posted it on Google Videos. I saw the first couple of Read More...
Posted Monday, January 29, 2007 8:59 AM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments
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Software Contracts, Part 9: Annotations Outside the Compiler - More Runtime Enforced Annotations

Ok, if it's not become crystal clear that I'm writing this on-the-cuff, this post will finally put a nail in the coffin. My last post discussed runtime enforced annotations and I used the RPC runtime library as an example of a runtime which enforces contractual Read More...
Posted Friday, January 26, 2007 12:10 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

Software Contracts, Part 8: Annotations outside the compiler - runtime enforced annotations.

Ok, it's taken 7 other posts, but we've finally gotten close to where I wanted to be when I started this series. Remember my definition of an annotation: An Annotation is an addition to the source code for a program that allows an external translator Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 25, 2007 3:40 PM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

Software Contracts, Part 7: Contracts as annotations - language features used to express contracts

My last post on contracts introduced the idea that a languages type system can be used as a mechanism to expose the contract of a function. It turns out that language designers started recognising this fact and they started adding annotations to types Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 24, 2007 4:40 PM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

How the Magic of Windows Vista saved 38G of my data

I always love it when the operating system I run finds new ways to absolutely delight me. Yesterday, due to a stupid pilot error, I accidentally deleted all the music and pictures from my machine at work (8G of pictures and 30G of music). This wasn't Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 23, 2007 10:23 AM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

Single Points of Failure

Over the weekend, my family had an annoying lesson in one of the basic principles of software engineering, the "Single Point of Failure". You see, when we built our house, we decided to go with a "hai-tekku" heating solution, and we're paying the price Read More...
Posted Monday, January 22, 2007 4:06 PM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

Software Contracts, Part 6: Annotations

In short, an "annotation" is an addition to the source code for a program that allows an external translator to enforce the program's contract. Way back in the beginning, the ONLY way to discover a function's contract was by it's documentation. A function's Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 18, 2007 3:40 PM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

20 years and going strong.

It was a day very similar to today. The sun was shining (at least during the day), and there was a light dusting of snow on the ground. The weather forecaster was warning that snow was threatening, and Valorie and I were running around like crazy running Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 17, 2007 1:57 PM by LarryOsterman | 18 Comments
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A Midsummer Night's Dream (The Musical) at KIDSTAGE TeenSelect!

Somehow I managed to forget (except for a passing reference) that Daniel's in THe Village Theatre's KIDSTAGE production of A Midsummer Night's Dream up in Everett, WA. He's got the role of Demetrious, one of the "fools these mortals be", in a Rock and Read More...
Posted Monday, January 15, 2007 3:16 PM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments
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Software Contracts, Part 5: Hold on a second, why do we care about this stuff anyway?

I'm more discombobulated than usual on this series, I totally missed the third article in the series when I should have gotten to it (this, btw, is why Raymond writes his stuff 8 months in advance - it lets him fix stuff like this). So consider this post Read More...
Posted Monday, January 15, 2007 2:49 PM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments

Software Contracts, Part 4: Documentation

The other day, I started talking about software contracts. Today I'd like to start talking about how contracts are embodied. The primary place people go to look for a function's explicit contract is the documentation for that function, either in the published Read More...
Posted Friday, January 12, 2007 1:29 PM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

A Snowy Day...

Well, yesterday was "fun". I left work at 5PM and got home at 10PM (to be fair, we stopped for dinner for an hour or so in the middle). ON THE other hand, this is what I see outside our front door this morning: What I see from my window right now: Across Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 11, 2007 10:33 AM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments
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A couple of thoughts on the iPhone...

It's weird, but I just don't get it. At MacWorld SF yesterday, Apple unveiled their new iPhone. I've got to say, it's drop-dead gorgeous. But I'm trying to understand the hype behind it, and I'm somehow failing miserably. Yeah, I work for Microsoft, so Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 10, 2007 2:37 PM by LarryOsterman | 27 Comments
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How long is a WAV file?

One question that kept on coming up during my earlier post was "How long is it going to take to play a .WAV file?". It turns out that this isn't actually a hard question to answer. The answer is embedded in the .WAV file if you know where to look. Just Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 10, 2007 2:05 PM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments
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Sometimes you find the answers to questions you didn't even know you were asking...

Yesterday's post by Raymond struck a chord when I read it. He discussed how the property sheets wrote to resource sections and how the kernel would patch up a resource section by making it read/write when the resource was written to. It turns out that Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 09, 2007 1:34 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

Software Contracts, Part 3 - Sometimes implicit contracts are subtle

I was planning on discussing this later on in the series, but "Dave" asked a question that really should be answered in a complete post (I did say I was doing this ad-hoc, it shows). Let's go back to the PlaySound API, and let's ask two different questions Read More...
Posted Monday, January 08, 2007 9:16 AM by LarryOsterman | 32 Comments

Software Contracts, Part 2 - There are two sides to every contract.

One thing that's critically important to understand when thinking about software contracts is that just like in real life, every contract has at least two sides to it. For real world contracts (that is agreements between two or more parties), the contract Read More...
Posted Friday, January 05, 2007 11:41 AM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

Contractual obligations

Once upon a time, I watched the TV show The Paper Chase. As I recall it, the feared and respected professor Kingman tought contract law, which could be thought as the organic chemistry of the legal profession (organic chem was the class that the chemical Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 04, 2007 10:24 AM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments

Where do you go to get answers to your technical questions.

One of the things I'm currently working on is analyzing our community efforts, so I'd like to turn the blog around and ask: When you have a technical question about a product, where do you go to look for answers? Places I know about (in no particular Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 03, 2007 12:37 PM by LarryOsterman | 46 Comments
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Where's Larry been?

Ok, 5+ weeks and no posts, what gives? Basically, after Vista shipped, I took a much needed vacation. I was looking at losing 2 weeks of vacation at the end of the year and I decided to spend some of the time I would have carried over and just take off Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 03, 2007 10:33 AM by LarryOsterman | 10 Comments
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