Under The Hood - Matt Pietrek

And with a panoramic sunset view of Seattle and the Eastside before us, I slipped the engagement ring on to her finger last night. So now it's official, Ian. :-)

A co-worker recently asked me what I thought about the upcoming hardening of the x64 versions of Windows , which makes it harder to write cool programs like Compuware's SoftIce , or RegMon & FileMon from SysInternals . The gist is that Windows will...

I recently was given a piece of C# code with statements like: yield return value; and yield break; This was the beginning of my descent into the loopy world of C# 2.0 iterators. It took me awhile to wrap my head around them, and...

A sad, sad day... As of April 3rd, 2006 the DriverStudio product family has retired. For customer support information please contact our FrontLine website. http://www.compuware.com/products/devpartner/default.htm Vast portions of my writing during...

Frank Grossman, one of the original authors of SoftIce and owners of NuMega sent this around to some of us old-time NuMega folks. I figured some of my readers might get a kick out of it. It's filled with inside references which I won't try to describe...

It's been awhile since I wrote for MSDN magazine. Now that I work for Microsoft, the whole financial situation changes. The short story is that I don't get paid for any articles or columns I might write for them. I'm not crying about this too much, as...

It's sad, but lately a lot of the music I love is released overseas first. Thanks to the internet, I can easily bypass the stupid release schedules of the record labels. Most recently, the Datsuns put out a new album (Outta Sight/Outta Mind) in the...

Awhile ago, I wrote about examining the structure of ETW Events by look at the MOF data in CIM Studio . Having recently started ETW instrumentation of the VS2005 Profiler components, now’s a good time to talk about creating and writing your own ETW events...

On the drive to work today, Chris Sells asked me what was new & cool with Whidbey debugging. Somewhere on my list was "Source Server" support. Chris's ear's perked up at that. I told him to dig around for an article, as I was sure somebody like...

Normally I don’t hit by viruses. I’m very good with Windows Update and keeping the anti-virus signatures up to date on my machine. Thus, I was very surprised yesterday afternoon when I saw a blinking tray icon and a badly worded balloon message indicating...

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...

So... My life has finally settled down a bit, and I find myself working for The Man , here in Redmond WA. This first post is really just to introduce myself a bit, and tell you where I think this blog will be going. I've been in software development...

I've been cleaning up a bunch of code lately (including warnings from our forthcoming static analysis tool .) I'm seeing a bunch of old code that uses integers when "unsigned int" was obviously the intended meaning. For instance: AddEntriesyToList( ENTRY...

It’s been awhile since I’ve had a technically focused blog post, so I’m rectifying that today. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work with Event Tracing for Windows (henceforth called “ETW” for brevity’s sake.) For the spelunker who wants to see the OS...

As part of this weekend's fun improving the performance of my aging 3-year old machine at home, I found that I could upgrade to modern day CPU performance for not that much $. My main machine at home is a 1.4 GHz Dell Dimension 8100. Apparently these...

The Visual Studio and CLR teams are huge. If we were to all develop on the same code base simultaneously, we'd kill a lot of time because instability caused by one team's changes would affect the whole project. To remedy this, groups of developers develop...

No, you're not missing any posts. I've jumped from Day 4 to Day 8. Last night WHS box passed the "Yep, still looking good" test, and got promoted to the dark closet beneath my stairway. No keyboard, mouse or monitor anymore. Just the AC cord and an...

In a previous post , I lamented the loss of SoftIce. Now, we truly are at the end of an era. Compuware is closing its development lab in New Hampshire. This is where tools like BoundsChecker, SoftIce, TrueTime, SmartCheck, CodeReview, and many others...

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...

I’m a big fan of writing your own version of tools, even if there’s already an existing tool. Why? Because writing your own tool is absolutely the best way to understand the concepts. You’ll run into all sorts of little gotchas and special...

The hardest part of planning our weddings was deciding where to go. The initial two contenders ( Tahiti and an African Safari) had drawbacks that we didn’t want to deal with right after a wedding. Finally I stumbled across Celebrity Cruise’s XPedition...

I alluded to some debugger cardinal rules in a prior post . However, they may well be something that debugger writers know, but haven't written down. To remedy, I'll start the list here. My first two rules: 1) Never lie to the user. Telling them incorrect...

While I'm generally in favor of cheap technology for the masses, I've recently been hit by the curse of inexpensive laptops. No, I'm not having problems myself. Rather, laptops are now cheap enough that lots of my non-technical family & friends...

Yesterday I identified a symbol loading issue with the current internal drop of the VS debugger. Within minutes, I had Steve Steiner from the debugger team here in my office, stepping through the code with me. It was a tricky situation because we were...

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...