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May 2007 - Posts

Compatibility works both ways

Windows is rather famous for its ability to run applications that were written for previous versions of the Windows operating system. Volumes have been written about Microsoft's backwards compatibility. On the other hand, people have long criticized Microsoft Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 30, 2007 9:24 AM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments
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Is a DoS a valid security problem?

Time for some more controversy... Another Microsoft developer and I recently had a fairly long email discussion about a potential problem. It turns out that it might be possible to craft a file in such a fashion that would cause some internal applications Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 17, 2007 12:30 PM by LarryOsterman | 25 Comments

The C abstract machine

I mentioned yesterday that the C/C++ language was defined to operate on an abstract machine. At the time I didn't know of an online reference to the C or C++ language standard, but a little birdie pointed me to this , which is a draft of the C language Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 16, 2007 3:50 PM by LarryOsterman | 21 Comments

Blocking your UI thread with PlaySound

For better or worse, the Windows UI model ties a window to a particular thread, that has led to a programming paradigm where work is divided between "UI threads" and "I/O threads". In order to keep your application responsive, it's critically important Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2007 10:45 AM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part 20: Yet another reason that named synchronization objects are dangerous, the answers

Microsoft can be quite obsessive about instrumentation and metrics. We have a significant body of tools that perform static and dynamic analysis on our operating systems. Some of these tools (for example prefast and FxCop ) are public, some are not. Friday Read More...
Posted Monday, May 14, 2007 12:19 PM by LarryOsterman | 19 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part 20(!): Yet another reason that named synchronization objects are dangerous...

When you're doing inter-process communication, it's often necessary to use named synchronization objects to communicate state between the processes. For instance, if you have a memory section that's shared between two processes, it's often convenient Read More...
Posted Friday, May 11, 2007 8:31 AM by LarryOsterman | 38 Comments

Curvy Volumes

Silly story. Way back when I first joined the audio team, Steve Ball (the PM for the team) showed up for work one day with his SPL meter. It seems he'd gone home and used his SPL meter to measure the output of the speakers. Much to his surprise, the volume Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 09, 2007 1:08 PM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments
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Volume in Windows Vista, part 3: Capture volume

As anyone who's read this blog with any regularity knows, my son Daniel is a budding actor. As such, many of his friends are also budding actors, and that means that we get to see lots of high school shows (we try to go to see every show that his friends Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 08, 2007 9:28 AM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments
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Where on earth did Larry go?

No, nothing bad happened to me, I just got a bit caught up in work stuff. I spent the last three weeks volunteering to help another team at Microsoft finish off the final set of work items on a new tool they're building - one of the developers on the Read More...
Posted Monday, May 07, 2007 8:10 AM by LarryOsterman | 17 Comments
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