Ishai's WebLog

Last year, Richard explained why sampling does not work on Virtual PC . Since the sampling failure is quite catastrophic, we blocked all profiling on Virtual PC. Some Beta users noticed that we block profiling also for instrumentation-based profiling...

Sometimes running a program under a debugger makes it work. Running the same program without a debugger causes a failure or a crash. Here are some reasons why this can happen: 1. Timing - attaching a debugging changes timing and can hide race conditions...

Raymond Chen describes the parameter passing aspect of the x64 calling convetions . But there is more than parameter passing to the calling convention. Exception handling is an important part of the calling convention. A function that calls another function...

Some people have asked for a “wall clock time” column in the sampling profiler report. Unfortunately, the actual time spent in a function cannot be reliably deduced from the collected data. Sampling counts “hits” on a function when a certain event occurs...

The Platform SDK includes a set of string manipulation functions defined in strsafe.h . These functions were added during the Windows Security push . The functions offer an alternative to the C run-time string functions which is more consistent, and less...

ISA Server 2004 is now available. Lots of new and improved features.

Why does the compiler generate a MOV EDI, EDI instruction at the beginning of functions? I’ve recently noticed that on the XPSP2 Beta that I am running the function prologs look like this: MOV EDI, EDI PUSH EBP MOV EBP, ESP ...

Well, probably not by nutritionists, but the USDA, backed by a court decision says they are. (Above link will probably expire in few days). [typo corrected 15:00]

Developing firewall and NAT friendly network applications When I worked on ISA Server I've seen network applications that were incompatible with firewalls and NAT and were difficult or impossible to configure the firewall for, even when the firewall...