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Applet Mitigations - Services.

As a senior developer at Microsoft, you often find yourself participating on a number of v-teams. One of the v-teams I'm on is responsible for approving new services added to Windows. As I've mentioned before, I'm a nutcase about stuff running on my machines, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 22, 2007 5:27 PM by LarryOsterman | 22 Comments

Applet Mitigations

As I've mentioned , applets can be a plague on your system. The annoying thing is that it's possible to write applets that aren't so horrible. And most of the mitigations are really just common sense ideas - there's nothing spectacularly complicated in Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 16, 2007 10:13 AM by LarryOsterman | 25 Comments

It's my computer, dagnabbit, not yours!

I've been wanting to write this one for a while, but continually got sidetracked, but there's no time like the present... Many others (I'm too lazy to chase down references) have commented on the phenomenon known as " bloatware " (also known as "craplets" Read More...
Posted Monday, August 13, 2007 4:46 PM by LarryOsterman | 31 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

So when is it ok to use SEH?

I got an email from someone using the contacts form asking: There is an article on MSDN about using VirtualAlloc to reserve then commit memory pages. Here is the link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/memory/base/reserving_and_committing_memory.asp Read More...
Posted Monday, October 16, 2006 11:36 AM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

Riffing on Raymond - Splay Trees

Raymond's post today on splay trees (brief summary: splay trees are interesting, but when you do an in-order traversal, they degrade to a linked list) reminded me of some "fun" I had with the NT 3.1 browser. The browser service is mostly dead these days, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 18, 2006 9:37 AM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments

Shared Services

One of the comments I made when doing my "first impressions" of the Mirra backup device was that the Windows software starts two separate services running in two different processes. I see this a lot - people architect their product into multiple services Read More...
Posted Friday, September 09, 2005 10:56 AM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

Michael's finally writing the nitty gritty details of DllLoad

I don't normally post on weekends, but I just noticed that Michael Grier 's finally started posting his " How does the NT loader work " series. His second post, on the basic operation of the loader is also up. Michael sent out a doc internally on Thursday Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 18, 2005 1:04 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

Still more misinformation about virtual memory and paging files

The wired network in my building's being unusually flakey so I'm posting this from my laptop, sorry for the brevety.. Slashdot had a front page story today about an article be Adrian Wong posted in his Rojak Pot: " Virtual Memory Optimization Guide ". Read More...
Posted Friday, March 25, 2005 1:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 25 Comments

Concurrency, part way too many - concurrency and the C runtime library.

For some reason, I can't seem to let this concurrency thing go, I keep on thinking of more and more relevant topics - there are a lot of issues surrounding concurrency. I realized today that my concurrency series didn't talk at all about libraries and Read More...
Posted Friday, March 18, 2005 1:27 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part 6

Today, let’s look at a trace log writer. It’s the kind of thing that you’d find in many applications; it simply does a printf and writes its output to a log file. In order to have maximum flexibility, the code re-opens the file every time the application Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 08, 2004 4:39 PM by LarryOsterman | 45 Comments

The consequences of ignoring nagling and delayed acks

Over most of this week, I’ve discussed how ignoring the underlying network architecture can radically hurt an application . Now it’s time for a war story about how things can go awry if you don’t notice these things. One of the basic Read More...
Posted Friday, August 06, 2004 5:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 6 Comments

Why should I even bother to use DLL's in my system?

At the end of this blog entry , I mentioned that when I drop a new version of winmm.dll on my machine, I need to reboot it. Cesar Eduardo Barros asked: Why do you have to reboot? Can't you just reopen the application that's using the dll, or restart the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 06, 2004 11:19 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

Mea Culpa (it's corrections time).

One of the rules in Tim Bray’s version of Sun’s blogging policy is “Write What You Know”. Well, I should have listened to this when I posted my 3 rd post, “ So why does NT require such a wonking great big paging file on my Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 05, 2004 4:28 PM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments

It's only temporary

NT has a whole lot of really cool features that aren’t always obvious without REALLY looking closely at the documentation. One of my favorite is what I call “temporary” temporary files. A “temporary” temporary file is one whose storage is never written Read More...
Posted Monday, April 19, 2004 4:43 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments
 
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