(There's been a sudden influx in blog readers asking me good questions, which is great. Be patient; I'll try to cover them over the next few entries.) In response to yesterday's entry on serializable JScript .NET objects, a reader asked ...

You learn something new every day in this job. Or, more accurately, some days you learn things again that you'd forgotten years ago. Someone just asked me why it is that all JScript .NET classes are serializable. I admit it, my first reaction...

Here's a question I get every now and then: I've written a VBScript program which calls a method on an object that returns an array of bytes containing a GUID. VBScript only supports arrays of variants. How can I turn this into a human...

Based on the excellent user feedback, I have significantly revised my article on the history of the strange VB/VBScript programming practice of habitually clearing objects unnecessarily right before they go out of scope. The revisions were sufficiently...

NOTE: I have significantly revised this article. What you are reading now is the archive of the original posting. The updated version is here http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2004/04/28/122259.aspx It's getting into sailing/kite flying...

Another bunch of good replies to my challenge of yesterday. And again, a bunch of answers that I didn't expect, and some of the points that I was thinking of weren't mentioned. People seem to like this more conversational format; I'll probably use...

A Joel On Software reader asked the other day for examples of recursive functions other than old chestnuts like Fibonacci or factorial. Excellent question. I suggested topological sort , of course, but there are plenty of other examples that are way better...

I was talking about localization in general the other day. Today, some brief notes on localization in JScript Classic. A while back, a coworker asked me: Does toLocaleString() do anything different than toString() when locale changes? I am especially...

"There is something missing from this analysis. Saying that this is an O(n) algorithm perhaps isn't quite the whole story. What did I leave out? That line in yesterday's post generated lots of good commentary. Several people mentioned some...

Last time on FABULOUS ADVENTURES: Eric Lippert: The second term is asymptotically insignificant compared to the first, so we'll throw it away, and declare that any sort on a list of n items has at least a worst case of O(n log n) comparisons. Leo...

A number of people have asked me for the software I used yesterday to extract the Google queries from the .TEXT referrer log. Have patience, and all will be revealed. In this and the next blog entries I'm going to demonstrate the difference between...

One of the reasons why I do all this technical stuff in a blog is to leverage the power of search engines like Google. I wrote a program the other day to go through the referrer log and extract all the Google queries that sent people to my page, and I...

A reader asked me a few questions about localization the other day. That's not a subject that I have a lot of experience on, but I can speak to it a bit. (I know that I've seen a blog from a Microsoft localization PM somewhere in the last six months,...

Gripe #7: Use The Right Struct For The Job I meant to include this one in yesterday's gripe about comments, as this illustrates a time when I found a comment that should never have been there. The person who wrote the comment should have realized that...

Gripe #6: Comment Rot If you've been reading my SimpleScript code you might have noticed that there are very few comments in my code. That's deliberate. Why do we have comments in the first place? We have comments because sometimes the semantics...

In Part Five I was discussing modules: there is a "global module" and any number of additional modules. Each module is associated with a named item, and the only module which is associated with more than one named item is the global module. This means...

#include "headers.h" HRESULT InvokeDispatch(IDispatch * pdisp, DISPID dispid, REFIID riid, LCID lcid, WORD flags, DISPPARAMS * pDispParams, VARIANT * pvarResult, EXCEPINFO * pExcepInfo, UINT * pError) { AssertReadPtr(pdisp); HRESULT hr; // We...

#ifndef INVOKE_H // { #define INVOKE_H extern HRESULT InvokeDispatch(IDispatch * pdisp, DISPID dispid, REFIID riid, LCID lcid, WORD flags, DISPPARAMS * pDispParams, VARIANT * pvarResult, EXCEPINFO * pExcepInfo, UINT * pError); extern BOOL IsValidDispatch...

#include "headers.h" Binder::Binder() { DLLAddRef(); this->m_cref = 1; this->m_thread = GetCurrentThreadId(); } Binder::~Binder(void) { DLLRelease(); } HRESULT Binder::Create(Binder * * ppBinder) { AssertOutPtr(ppBinder); *ppBinder ...

#ifndef BINDER_H // { #define BINDER_H class Binder : public IDispatch { protected: class Name { public: Name(); ~Name(); HRESULT SetValue(VARIANTARG * pvar); HRESULT GetValue(VARIANT * pvar); BOOL IsFunction(void); HRESULT ExecuteFunction...