I call this DNS art :) Try running this from a cmd prompt: tracert -h 99 216.81.59.173 You'll get something like this: <initial routing...> 13 * * * Request timed out. 14 150 ms 153 ms 144 ms Episode.IV [206.214.251.1] 15 152 ms 147 ms...

(or why Windows Audio is holding an Event Log file open) Today’s blog post will be about the “File in use” dialog. You may have encountered this dialog when trying to delete a file that you happened to have already open. In Windows Vista, all you got...

It’s kind of funny really. The ZIP specification mandates that a program/OS creating a zip archive include a tag informing about itself to the program trying to decompress the archive. This information is called “version made by”, and...

Recently, I received some e-mail sent to one of our internal DLs describing an issue a customer is facing when using Remote Assistance: My customers engineer requests to connect to a user’s machine via remote assistance. The user accepts and the engineer...

My team is responsible for issuing updates whenever a country decides to change their daylight savings start/end dates, or even time zone. Most recently, we’ve released an update for Chile. More information: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dst2007/archive...

If you’re a developer writing for Windows 7, you’ll probably have noticed that icons in the System Tray aren’t shown by default. Raymond Chen blogged about this recently, here and here . Notification icons are identified by a GUID, a G lobally U nique...

Ok, so you can’t directly file a bug. Just imagine the number of random noise/issues (“my computer is slow” – well if you didn’t install that crapware you did last week maybe it wouldn’t be?)  we’d have to go through daily just to keep up with the...

If you’ve run into a situation where in Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2, some of your programs’ jump lists are not showing up anymore, you might be running into a bug I recently fixed. The fix is available through Windows Update (it should be offered to you...

I know, everybody must be asking themselves this question. Luckily, I can now show you a bit more of what my team and I have been working for the better part of 2011! Enter what we call the “Windows 8 Copy UX” Read Steven Sinofsky’s blog entry for the...

If you’re one of the two people in the world that follow my blog (thank you Mom!) then you know that I’ve recently had a run-in with physics and my hard drive lost. Long story short, I was able to recover the files like so . If you’ve...

You might ask, why would I want to do that…ever? Well, it may become more clear in my next post, so bear with me. It turns out I wasn’t able to find a download location for the VC 7.1 runtime. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough, whatever. What I did find...

A little while ago, I started getting bugchecks (BSOD). At first I didn’t pay much attention to them, but as they started to occur more frequently I guess the writing was on the wall. The bugcheck code in question was STOP 0x7A - KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR...

  I recently had to look into a Group Policy called “Turn off Windows+X hotkeys”. Apparently a lot of people interpret this as meaning “Turn off the Windows+X hotkey”. Ah, the joys of semantics: Policy Turn off Windows+X hotkeys Category Path User...

I recently got an HTC Hero phone (currently running Android 2.1 "Eclair"). Long story short, I haven't gotten my phone to properly sync with my Facebook contacts. Originally, I wasn't able to see any Facebook contacts. Then something happened and I...

If you are writing a context menu for the device center, you will probably need to get the "canonical" or "friendly" name of the printer or device that the user has right-clicked on. While your context menu extension gets passed a data object that should...

Kylie Good News (I call it "More Happy is coming")

0:005> ~2s DpoFeedb!get_lastknownversion+0xd382: 00000000`1002f812 0f8418feffff je DpoFeedb!get_lastknownversion+0xd1a0 (00000000`1002f630) [br=1] 0:002> p DpoFeedb!get_lastknownversion+0xd1a0: 00000000`1002f630 488b02 mov rax,qword ptr [rdx] ds...

I recently bought an HP dv7t laptop and also got one of those HP multi-function printers. So far so good. After installing the printer's drivers and apps, I noticed a significant slowdown. Opened up taskmgr and lo and behold, hpqtra08.exe was taking up...

Now what happens if the dependency is not with respect to a regular API, but with a COM interface ? Suppose a COM interface IControl is implemented by CControl, in a dll DLL1. Now DLL2 obtains this CControl indirectly (for example, calling IControl...

Suppose you have a huge product (such as Windows) for which fix bugs daily. These fixes need to ship through some mechanism (download central, Windows Update, etc.). Of course you can't re-distribute the whole OS every time you fix a one-line bug. Therefore...

The Windows 7 beta is available for download, but only for the first 2.5 million users, so act fast!! Get yours now. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windows7 for more info or download it here

The purpose of this blog is to write about my work as a developer in the Windows Serviceability organization, more specifically in the Client Platform team. My org's main responsibility is fixing bugs in the currently released version of Windows, currently...