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Insightful graph: The ship date predictor
The best graphs are the ones that require no explanation. You are just told what the x- and y-axes represent, and the answer just jumps out at you. One of the greatest graphs I've seen at Microsoft is...
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Microspeak: DRI, the designated response individual
Someone sent a message to a peer-to-peer discussion group and remarked, "This is critical. I'm a DRI at the moment and have some issues to fix." The term DRI was new to many people on the mailing list...
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Rules can exist not because there's a problem, but in order to prevent future...
I lost the link, but one commenter noted that the ReadÂFile function documentation says Applications must not read from, write to, reallocate, or free the input buffer that a read operation is using...
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The Windows 95 I/O system assumed that if it wrote a byte, then it could read...
In Windows 95, compressed data was read off the disk in three steps. The raw compressed data was read into a temporary buffer. The compressed data was uncompressed into a second temporary buffer. The...
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Debugging walkthrough: Access violation on nonsense instruction, episode 3
A colleague of mine asked for help debugging a strange failure. Execution halted on what appeared to be a nonsense instruction. eax=022b13a0 ebx=00000000 ecx=02570df4 edx=769f4544 esi=02570dec...
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The Itanium processor, part 2: Instruction encoding, templates, and stops
Instructions on Itanium are grouped into chunks of three, known as bundles, and each of the three positions in a bundle is known as a slot. A bundle is 128 bits long (16 bytes) and always resides on a...
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Debugging walkthrough: Access violation on nonsense instruction, episode 3
A colleague of mine asked for help debugging a strange failure. Execution halted on what appeared to be a nonsense instruction. eax=022b13a0 ebx=00000000 ecx=02570df4 edx=769f4544 esi=02570dec...
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How do I enumerate remembered connections that are not currently connected?
Harry Johnston wanted to know how to get a list of remembered (but not currently connected) drive mappings. The idea here is to make a tweak to the Little Program. Start with what we had and make...
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Microspeak: move the needle
The phrase move the needle is part of general business jargon, but it is very popular here at Microsoft. You need to know what it means, and more importantly, you need to be willing to throw it around...
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I saved some files into the Program Files directory, and now they're gone!
A customer reported that they saved some files in the Program Files directory, but when they went back to check, the files were gone! What happened? What most likely happened is UAC Virtualization....
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When I change the icon in my shortcut, why doesn't it update on the screen?
A customer was having trouble updating the icon in one of their shortcuts. Here's what they shared with us: i_shell_link->SetIconLocation(icon_file.value().c_str(), 0); "Changing the icon from the...
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Using an intermediate library to make the main library retargetable
A customer was developing a static library targetting both Windows XP Win32 applications and universal Windows apps. (This was before Windows XP reached end-of-life.) Our library uses critical...
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I guess this explains why Warren Buffett hasn't retired
Microsoft provides to its employees a retirement calculator that is more detailed than the kinds you can find on the Internet. After gathering all sorts of information, including your savings and...
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Cynical interpretations of various project milestones
Official nameCynical interpretationCoding milestoneWriting new bugsIntegration milestoneMerging bugs from other teamsStabilization milestoneFixing bugs
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Raymond's Windows Universal Samples API concordance
If you want to find an SDK sample that uses a particular feature of the Universal Windows Platform, you can try my Windows Universal Samples API concordance on...
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How do you get network connectivity from the worst PC in the world?
Some time ago, I wrote about the two worst PCs ever. The worst PC of all time, according to PC World magazine was the Packard Bell PC. As installed at the factory, the computer came with every single...
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The C runtime library cannot be mixed and matched
In 2011, a customer had an application written in C++ with Visual Studio 2003 that consumes a static library provided by a third party, let's call it contoso.lib. Now, contoso.lib is a static library...
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How do I run a Web search in the user's default Web browser using their...
More than one customer has asked, "How do I run a Web search in the user's default Web browser using their default search provider?" Nobody knows for sure. Windows does define a mechanism for...
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A process inherits its environment from its parent, and the consequences of...
A customer reported that they changed some system-level enviornment variables (include PATH). They also have a batch file that, among other things, runs a program that requires that the PATH be set a...
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Why doesn't GetAddrInfo work from behind a proxy?
A customer was having a problem with the GetÂAddrÂInfo function when running inside a corporate proxy environment. We are trying to get the IP address of, say, www.microsoft.com by using the...
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