Under The Hood - Matt Pietrek

I'm in troubleshooting mode now. The last two mornings I've woken up to a frozen server machine. No blue screen. Just the screen contents from whenever it froze some number of hours ago. I've checked all the event logs and don't see any suspicious...

Last night was exciting as we got another build of WHS to play with. Since I had no data on the box from the previous version, I just did a "blow everything away" install. Nothing exciting to report in this regard, other than it rebooted many times along...

Maybe it's just because my new box is setting next to me on the desk, but it's pretty loud. I suspect it's all the case fans. I would just pull the plug on some of the fans, but the temperature on the box slowly creeps up over time. Based on data from...

The new PC I ordered to run Windows Home Server arrived last night, and I'm happily fiddling with it. Despite waiting far longer than Cyberpower originally estimated to ship it, the box itself seems decent enough and booted Windows Home Server from...

OK, perhaps not news to everybody, but I was surprised to learn this yesterday. Robocopy is a powerful file copying utility that's much more robust than COPY or XCOPY. It's especially useful for huge file copies, especially over flakey network connections...

Being the good dogfooder I am, I'm running Vista in x64 mode. My current project involves moving over an existing web service to the new machine. As part of this, I've installed all the latest internal VS2005 goodies relating to service packs and Vista...

In a previous post , I mentioned the new slim reader/writer locks in Vista. A kind reader just sent me a note that Joe Duffy's blog recently added a nifty history of the feature and it's underlying implementation , including how a single lock can be used...

OK... It's not a super-duper juicy revelation, but it's exciting to me. Raymond Chen has finally gone public with his book: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/12/07/1233002.aspx Many, many moons ago I was contacted by AW and asked to...

Perhaps jumping the gun here as the official doc still hasn't been posted yet, but soon, I'm told. In a nutshell, Vista's debugger support will include some additional functionality to let you customize out AeDebug works. Specifically, if "Auto" debugging...

If you're an aficionado of all things PE file related, you'll get a kick of this article: http://www.phreedom.org/solar/code/tinype/ It shows all the wild twists and contortions to make a legal 97 byte Win32 PE file. I think the smallest Win32...

Today marks my first day in a different division at Microsoft. I'm now part of the Center For Software Excellence team: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/cse/default.mspx . Basically, this group write the cool internal tools that groups within Microsoft...

So I'm just a wee bit sleepy this morning. The missus and I were out late last night at the Showbox, watching Joan Jett. I'm happy to say that Joan puts on a good show, although the "Blackhearts" looked far too young to be the originals. :-) Even...

In a recent internal thread, there's been some good discussion about the new Slim Reader Writer locks in Vista. See the SRWLockXXX functions for details. A brief synopis of the key points about these locks: Since XP, there's a new intra -process...

I saw this comment in a design spec, and it made me laugh: TEST NOTE: Please test that we don’t accidentally blast the LastError value; few error messages are more frustrating than “Error: The operation completed successfully.”

Somehow in my heads down mode lately, I haven't had a chance to monitor all the new Win32 API goodies that Vista brings to the table. A friend just mailed me a question about one of these functions, which set off a little research jag. The short story...

Yes, it's been awhile since my last post. While I've been busy on lots of interesting work, nothing blog-worthy. A friend just reported this minor issue to me, and it was confirmed by some folks in Windows. In the latest SDK headers, you'll find...

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=219294 It's me, talking about what I've been working on since I came to MS. In case you're wondering, yes, it was really hot in my office during the taping. :-)

In a prior blog entry , I asked if anybody could recognize the people in the picture. Surprisingly, I got very few responses. However, at least one person picked out Charles and Jeffrey. Nobody guessed that I was in the picture. (Perhaps it was too...

I was working with my scanner this weekend, bringing in old pictures to my digital image library. Prizeless contest: Can anybody identify the four people in the foreground of this photo? If you're in the photo, just email me directly Y'all should...

I spent many years prior to coming to Microsoft doing "dangerous" things inside of DllMain. If you're a diagnostic tool developer, it's often the only reasonable place to take key actions that must occur as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the MSDN...

I haven't yet had a chance to play with these yet, but Vista includes new APIs for determining why a thread is blocked. That is, you can learn that thread 'A' is blocked on object 'X' which is owned by thread 'B'. Thread 'B' in turn in blocked on object...

Mr. DbgHelp just sent me this link: http://www.debuginfo.com/index.html I confess that I haven't read every article yet, but it looks chock full of good stuff for debugger nerds like myself. I especially like the article on " How to use DbgHelp...

I downloaded and played with Windows Media Player 11, beta 2 this weekend. All the attention has been on the URGE integration, but online music stores aren’t my particular ball of wax at the moment. However, I do have a decent sized CD collection that...

As Raymond mentioned in his post , the MSDN site finally has some decent documentation on the x64 calling convention, including: Alignment Requirements for x64 64-Bit Register Usage for x64 64-Bit Calling Convention Process for x64 64-Bit...

Finally, a response to some comments and questions about my x64 article . Registry Fun Noah Harrison thinks I got it backwards when I said: "As you'd expect, the OS provides an escape hatch for 32-bit applications to read the actual 64-bit registry...