Free Associations

For my first blog entry, I will start with something I wrote for my team back in 1997 (reedited for this blog) that has been helpful to generations of subsequently bewildered developers: Go back to 1995 and a small team dreaming an impossible dream...

Windows Explorer has a default implementation for IContextMenu commonly called DefCM that has been used since Win95. It has many clients and has evolved over time, of course, but its primary focus has always been to support the most important of shell...

IE8 beta1 introduced Loosely Coupled IE (LCIE) which gives tab a level of process isolation from the frame: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/11/ie8-and-loosely-coupled-ie-lcie.aspx . For the most part this works pretty well. But certain binary...

I was looking at some code the other day that does string concatenation with StringCchPrintf(“%s%s”). I can imagine how this would have near optimal performance, and a hopeful developer could easily assume that in fact it has been tuned for this kind...

http://www.microspotting.com/2009/02/zeke

… like a water snake. Which is why we measure, measure and measure again. Even the most obvious rule of thumb can be wrong. I was optimizing some string parsing code (which is almost always ripe for optimization), and trying to reduce the cost of traversing...