Under The Hood - Matt Pietrek

Today I had my first experience with using manifest files for Win32 binaries. If you're only familiar with .NET manifest, never fear, as Windows itself uses essentially the same mechanisms. In my particular case, I wanted to ensure that a DLL I wrote...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Yesterday I spent a long time tracking down a problem with PDB symbol access. I figured I could spare some poor soul from going through the same pain as I did by documenting what I found out. The synopsis: If you're using DBGHELP to read PDB symbols,...

One of the best experiences of my programming career was during the golden years of NuMega. Roughly defined as when I started in 1993, up to the acquisition of NuMega by Compuware, roughly five years later. During those years, we put out some terrific...

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...

This morning my wife was firmly ensconced on the couch with the puppy, catching up on her shows on Media Center. Sensing some free time, I snuck upstairs and began poking around at getting remote access working with Windows Home Server. The real...

In another post , Steve Loughran asks "Why does the PDB format change every release? What is wrong with having one standard layout for debug symbols and leaving it alone?" A good question, and one that I wondered about many years ago. The answer is that...

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...

While the Windows 7 UI is currently getting most of the "What's new?" attention, I'm a system guy at heart. I gravitate towards the tools and features that let me understand what's going on. Why does program 'X' take so long to load? Which of my dozens...

Raymond's post on the history of Dr. Watson is right on the money. Some additional info, since I have some somewhat close personal connection. When Dr. Watson first became available, I loved what it did. I was working at Borland at the time, and had...

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 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...

Raymond Chen has an interesting post about a program that tried to open a file, got back an error code, and used the error code as a file handle. In this particular scenario everything worked, but completely by accident. Reading it, I remembered back...

I'm really getting a kick out of playing with Windows on x64. Since my last post , I've successfully built my PEDUMP as a native Win64 app, and it's running well against everything I throw at it. Yesterday I got to 95% completion with my native command...

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...

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...

In my previous post , I described the requirements and purchasing decisions around a new Windows Media Center based PC, running Windows 7, and acting as a no-touch appliance. When I left off, I had purchased an HP s5100z PC and added an HD 4350 Video...

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...

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. :-)