Under The Hood - Matt Pietrek

Having been at Microsoft for a little over four months now, I've started to get into the swing of the development process here. I've been mostly helping Something I've noticed is that writing code, performance tuning, or debugging is the easy part...

Out of the blue yesterday an internal MS architect called me in my office (which rarely happens.) They needed to debug a second instance of Windows Media Player which crashed when launched within Internet Explorer. The good old "Attach to process" debugger...

If your app depends on a particular set of environment variables, it could sometimes be a real pain to debug. Case in point: The .NET profiling API depends on two environment variables to push the unmanaged profiling DLL into a process. I covered this...

Not a bad weekend that just ended. The highlights: Death Metal Parrot - Friday Night, Carrie and I went out to dinner with Pat Styles and his fiancée Lynn. While the drinks and food were great, the thing that stuck out the most was a 7" vinyl disk on...

Just moments ago, I got my first email from Mark Zbikowski. What an honor! (OK, so it was just a request to pass something along to some folks at my previous company.) Nonetheless, it was a small thrill to see the name in my inbox. If you don't know who...

A reader of my Under The Hood columns writes: I know the PID of a process, I need to get the environment strings of that process. My problem is, the environment string address of each process seems different. If I can get the environment string address...

A fun day yesterday. Tim Ewald was in town with his wife Sarah and their new son, so we set up a little BBQ at our place. Jason Clarke and his wife Annette also joined us. As an added bonus, moments before Tim & Sarah arrived, we got a call from some...

What a surprise to find Mike Geary commenting on my C# Iterators blog entry . Back when I was a young pup, I had my set of programming heroes that taught me most of what I know. People like Ray Duncan, Doug Boling, Jeff Prosise and Mike Geary. If you...

So says our illustrious PM Eric, who's famous for not discarding the used styrofoam cups in his office. The occasion? A going away soirée for a fellow teammate, Simon , who's headed back to England. The turnout was good, much beer was consumed...

There's an interesting interview with Charles Petzold up on the DotNetRocks site (audio stream: http://perseus.franklins.net//DotNetRocks_0077_Charles_Petzold.asx ) Charles covers a variety of topics, but especially interesting to me was his own struggles...