I may have forgotten to mention it, but my expertise is not in image processing.  The people who know better will likely tsk mightily at this and upcoming posts. My apologies. =) Last time got me a b&w-converted version of a picture, but didn...

First thought – convert the picture to greyscale and increase the contrast to help any kind of edge-detection work.  Some searching found me Bob Powell's handy guide to increasing contrast and converting to grayscale via ColorMatrix.  With Wikipedia...

I got this silly idea in my head last week that I’d take my brand-new high-def handheld video camera and use it to produce a catalog of books, DVDs, etc. that are lying around the house.  Simple premise – turn on the camera and wave games, DVDs,...

Glenn writes: "What is the c:\windows\winsxs\manifestcache\6.0.6001.18000_001c50b5_blobs.bin file and why is it taking up 156Mb on my hard drive? Do I really need a file this big?" That file is used by the Windows Update mechanisms in Vista....

Recently, someone asked about how their code should work if a certain configuration setting was missing from the registry. The responses were mixed. One suggested checking the value of RegQueryValue. Another suggested that the missing value should cause...

In Windows Vista, the directory %windir%\WinSxS has much stronger protection on it than it did in Windows XP and Server 2003. The owner/group is now a SID named "Trusted Installer", a service SID used to start the TrustedInstaller service. Users other...

A question came up on an internal newsgroup recently - "How do I do on-demand initialization of critical sections in a multithread-aware library?" The asker didn't have an explicit Initialize function in which his critical section could be created, and...

Manifests at resource ID 2 help simplify the lives of DLL authors who want to consume side-by-side components via static imports. Just before processing your DLL's static imports and calling its entrypoint, the loader will create and activate an activation...

As explained earlier , the activation context system is implemented as a per-thread (or per-fiber) stack. Activating a context pushes the context onto the stack, deactivating it pops it from the stack. To ensure that the same sequence of pushes and pops...

As the number of apps in the world that use side-by-side activation (as a result of depending on the new Visual C++ Runtime v8.0) increases, providers of callable code (libraries, control packs, whatever) may start seeing odd and potentially unexpected...

As the Visual C++ Runtimes version 8.0 is now a side-by-side component, you may have seen what looks like an unreasonably complexly named path from which parts of the CRT are loaded. "Golly, what can they possibly be thinking - creating a directory whose...

Not too long ago, I was asked to provide a set of merge modules for an external team. The restriction was that they could accept an exe whose output was the merge module in question, and it had to generate stable – based on the content – component IDs...

One of the more problematic areas of long-lived software is the versioning and updating of shared structures. As improvements come to a package, it's inevitable that you'll have to add more fields to a structure. Your structure today may contain two pointers...

An area of new technology in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 that didn't get nearly enough coverage is the ability to write applications and components that take full advantage of COM without actually registering anything on the target system. Apps...

Howdy - I'm a software design engineer at Microsoft, in the Windows core technologies group. My work involves isolating applications, components, and the operating system from each other. I don't have much original or interesting to say, but by gum -...