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September 2008 - Posts

Ok, I’m strange…

I was looking at the front page of MSNBC and ran into this picture : (image copyright Sebastiao Moreira / EPA).    My first thought was “Why do these people all have hotdogs with yellow mustard pressed up to their face?”   I did say that Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2008 5:11 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments
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DrawThemeText doesn’t really support the DT_CALCRECT format value

I just noticed this while working on a bug fix. We have some code that attempts to determine the size of a piece of text by calling DrawThemeText with the DT_CALCRECT format value. According to this page (as of 9/30/2008) the DT_CALCRECT option determines Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2008 4:49 PM by LarryOsterman | 1 Comments
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Why specify SND_NODEFAULT when calling PlaySound?

Because the alternative is often much worse.   Several months ago, I got a bug report that if you launched mmsys.cpl then set the “Select” sound to a value, then cleared the sound, the reporters application would ding whenever you moved around their Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 25, 2008 2:46 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

They just announced my PDC talk, so I guess I can mention at least the title of the talk.

The PDC folks just announced a host of Windows 7 related PDC talks , one of which is mine. The title of the talk is “Windows 7: Building Great Communications Applications”.  You can find it under the Windows 7 track on the Microsoft PDC site .   Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 11:21 AM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments
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Why call PlaySound(NULL, NULL, SND_NODEFAULT)?

Someone just wandered over to my office and he had noticed the following pattern in his code: PlaySound(NULL, NULL, SND_NODEFAULT); PlaySound( ".Default" , NULL, SND_SYSTEM | SND_ASYNC | SND_NODEFAULT); He was wondering why on earth the code Read More...
Posted Monday, September 15, 2008 5:18 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

See you in LA in October!

I just got word that the talk we’d proposed for the PDC in October was approved, so I’m going to La-La-Land next month for a couple of days.   The contents of my talk have not yet been disclosed, so I can’t talk about what I’m talking about at the Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 11, 2008 9:09 AM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments
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What’s wrong with this code, Part 23 – The Answers

My last post was all about a problem with what appeared to be some really simple ATL code. It turns out that the problem was easier than I had expected.  James Skimming came up with the answer on the second comment.  The problem here was that Read More...
Posted Monday, September 08, 2008 3:19 PM by LarryOsterman | 21 Comments

What’s wrong with this code, Part 23..

I recently tracked down a bug that was causing problems in my code.  Once I figured out the bug, I realized it made a good “what’s wrong with this code”… #include "stdafx.h" #include <mmdeviceapi.h> IMMDeviceEnumerator *GetDeviceEnumerator() Read More...
Posted Friday, September 05, 2008 8:45 AM by LarryOsterman | 26 Comments

Anatomy of a Heisenbug

I just spent a half an hour debugging a heisenbug and thought I’d pass on what was happening.   I was running my unit tests for one of my features and they were reliably failing.  Unfortunately the instant I ran the test case under the debugger, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 03, 2008 10:43 AM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments
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I'm So Excited!

'nuf said.     I know it's bragging, but I'm sorry - I really couldn't resist.  It's been a very long time. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 02, 2008 8:33 PM by LarryOsterman | 34 Comments
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