Holy cow, I wrote a book!
Today we're going to take a little trip in the wayback machine with the help of my colleague Seth Manheim, who was there when this happened.
Set the date to November 22, 1989, twenty years ago and one day. Bill Gates is being taken on a guided tour of the product support department's new office building, and during his visit, he asks one of the people manning the phones, "Mind if I take this call?"
Bill puts on a headset, sits down, and answers the phone. "Hello, this is Microsoft Product Support, William speaking. How can I help you?"
Bill talks with the customer, collects the details of the problem, searches in the product support Knowledge Base, sifts through the search results, finds the solution, and patiently walks the customer through fixing the problem.
The customer is thrilled that William was able to fix the problem so quickly, and with such a pleasant attitude. Bill wraps up the call. "And thank you for using Microsoft products."
At no point did Bill identify himself as anything other than William. The customer had no idea that the product support engineer who took the call was none other than Bill Gates.
But the story doesn't end there.
Even though this story took place while most of the support staff were on their lunch break, news travels quickly, and soon everybody in the department knows about The time Bill took a product support call.
Some time later, the same customer calls back with a follow-up question.
— Hi, I called you folks with a problem with XYZ, and I talked with a nice man named William who straightened it all out. But I have another question. Can I speak with William?
"Okay, let me see if William is available." The product support engineer brings up the customer's service record and looks at the name of the support engineer who handled the earlier call: billg.
"Yeah, um, I'm sorry, but William is not available right now. His friends call him Bill, by the way. The person who helped you last time? That was Bill Gates."
— Oh my God.
While I'm tinkering with the wayback machine, I may as well point you to a story from a few years ago with a similar (but less dramatic) punch line.
Back in the late 1990s, some large Internet association conducted a survey in order to bestow awards in categories like Best Web server and Best Web browser, and one of the categories was Best Web authoring tool.
We didn't find out about this until the organization contacted the Windows team and said, "Hi, we would like to present Microsoft with the award for Best Web authoring tool. Please let us know who the author of Notepad is, so that we can invite them to the award ceremony."
Yup, Notepad won the award for Best Web authoring tool.
The mail went out to the team. "Hey, does anybody remember who wrote Notepad?"
Even a decade ago, the original authorship of Notepad was lost to the mists of time. I think the person who ended up going was the original author of the multi-line edit control, since that's where the guts of Notepad lie.
WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN
The WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN symbol was introduced in the Windows 95 time frame as a way to exclude a bunch of Windows header files when you include windows.h. You can take a look at your windows.h file to see which ones they are.
windows.h
The symbol was added as part of the transition from 16-bit Windows to 32-bit Windows. The 16-bit windows.h header file didn't include all of those header files, and defining WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN brought you back to the 16-bit Windows philosophy of a minimal set of header files for writing a bare-bones Windows program. This appeased the programmers who liked to micro-manage their header files, and it was a big help because, at the time the symbol was introduced, precompiled header files were not in common use. As I recall, on a 50MHz 80486 with 8MB of memory, switching to WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN shaved three seconds off the compile time of each C file. When your project consists of 20 C files, that's a whole minute saved right there.
Moore's Law and precompiled headers have conspired to render the WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN symbol relative useless. It doesn't really save you much any more. But at one point, it did.
I've received independent confirmations as to the authorship of Notepad, so I'm inclined to believe it. Sorry you didn't get to go to the award ceremony.
The original author of Notepad also served as the development manager for Windows 95. His job was to herd the cats that made up the programmers who worked on Windows 95, a job which you can imagine falls into the "not easy" category.
After Windows 95, he retired from the software industry and became a high school science teacher. At a social event some years later, I met him again and asked about the transition from software development manager to high school science teacher.
His response: "You'd be surprised how many of the skills transfer."
A customer reported that there was a leak in the shell, and they included the output from Application Verifier as proof. And yup, the memory that was leaked was in fact allocated by the shell:
VERIFIER STOP 00000900 : pid 0x3A4: A heap allocation was leaked. 497D0FC0 : Address of the leaked allocation. 002DB580 : Adress to the allocation stack trace. 0D65CFE8 : Address of the owner dll name. 6F560000 : Base of the owner dll. 1: kd> du 0D65CFE8 0d65cfe8 "SHLWAPI.dll" 1: kd> !heap -p -a 497D0FC0 ... ntdll!RtlpAllocateHeap+0x0003f236 ntdll!RtlAllocateHeap+0x0000014f Kernel32!LocalAlloc+0x0000007c shlwapi!CreateMemStreamEx+0x00000043 shlwapi!CreateMemStream+0x00000012 <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x000642de <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x0005e2af <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x0002d49a <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x0002a0fd <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x000289cb <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x0002a25c <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x00027225 <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x0002252b <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x00025394 <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x0004d70f Kernel32!BaseThreadInitThunk+0x0000000d ntdll!RtlUserThreadStart+0x0000001d 1: kd> dps 002DB580 shlwapi!CreateMemStreamEx+0x43 shlwapi!CreateMemStream+0x12 <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x642de <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x5e2af <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x2d49a <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x2a0fd <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x289cb <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x2a25c <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x27225 <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x2252b <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x25394 <Unloaded_xyz.dll>+0x4d70f Kernel32!BaseThreadInitThunk+0xd ntdll!RtlUserThreadStart+0x1d
On the other hand, SHCreateMemStream is an object creation function, so it's natural that the function allocate some memory. The responsibility for freeing the memory belongs to the caller.
SHCreateMemStream
We suggested that the customer appears to have leaked the interface pointer. Perhaps there's a hole where they called AddRef and managed to avoid the matching Release.
AddRef
Release
"Oh no," the customer replied, "that's not possible. We call this function in only one place, and we use a smart pointer, so a leak is impossible." The customer was kind enough to include a code snippet and even highlighted the lines that proved they weren't leaking.
CComPtr<IStream> pMemoryStream; CComPtr<IXmlReader> pReader; UINT nDepth = 0; //Open read-only input stream pMemoryStream = ::SHCreateMemStream(utf8Xml, cbUtf8Xml);
The exercise for today is to identify the irony in the highlighted lines.
Hint. Answers (and more discussion) tomorrow.
Knowledge Base article 139071 has the technically correct but easily misinterpreted title FIX: OLE Automation BSTR caching will cause memory leak sources in Windows 2000. The title is misleading because it makes you think that Oh, this is a fix for a memory leak in OLE Automation, but that's not what it is.
The BSTR is the string type used by OLE Automation, and since strings are used a lot, OLE Automation maintains a cache of recently-freed strings which it can re-use when somebody allocates a new one. Caches are nice (though you need to make sure you have a good replacement policy), but they confuse memory leak detection tools, because the memory leak detection tool will not be able to match up the allocator with the deallocator. What the memory leak detection tool sees is not the creation and freeing of strings but rather the allocation and deallocation of memory. And if there is a string cache (say, of just one entry, for simplicity), what the memory leak detection tool sees is only a part of the real story.
BSTR
Your program sees only the lines marked Program:, and the memory leak detection tool sees only the underlined part. As a result, the memory leak detection tool sees a warped view of the program's string usage:
Notice that the memory leak detection tool thinks that line 6 freed the memory allocated by line 1, even though the two lines of the program are unrelated. Line 6 is freeing string 2, and line 1 is creating string 1!
Notice also that the memory leak detection tool will report a memory leak, because it sees that you allocated two memory blocks but deallocated only one of them. The memory leak detection tool will say, "Memory allocated at line 4 is never freed." And you stare at line 4 of your program and insist that the memory leak detection tool is on crack because there, you freed it right at the very next line! You chalk this up as "Stupid memory leak detection tool, it has all these useless false positives."
Even worse: Suppose somebody deletes line 6 of your program, thereby introducing a genuine memory leak. Now the memory leak detection tool will report two leaks:
You already marked the second report as bogus during your last round of investigation. Now you look at the first report, and decide that it too is bogus; I mean look, we free the string right there at line 2!
Result: A memory leak is introduced, the memory leak detection tool finds it, but you discard it as another bug in the memory leak detection tool.
When you're doing memory leak detection, it helps to disable your caches. That way, the high-level object creation and destruction performed in your program maps more directly to the low-level memory allocation and deallocation functions tracked by the memory leak detection tool. In our example, if there were no cache, then every Create string would map directly to an Allocate memory call, and every Free string would map directly to a Deallocate memory call.
What KB article 139071 is trying to say is FIX: OLE Automation BSTR cache cannot be disabled in Windows 2000. Windows XP already contains support for the OANOCACHE environment variable, which disables the BSTR cache so you can investigate those BSTR leaks more effectively. The hotfix adds support for OANOCACHE to Windows 2000.
OANOCACHE
Bonus chatter: Why do we have BSTR anyway? Why not just use null-terminated strings everywhere?
The BSTR data type was introduced by Visual Basic. They couldn't use null-terminated strings because Basic permits nulls to be embedded in strings. Whereas Win32 is based on the K&R C way of doing things, OLE automation is based on the Basic way of doing things.
A customer came to the Windows team with a question, the sort of question which on its face seems somewhat strange, which is itself a sign that the question is merely the tip of a much more dangerous iceberg.
Under what circumstances will the GetEnvironmentVariable function hang?
GetEnvironmentVariable
This is kind of an open-ended question. I mean, for example, somebody might sneak in and call SuspendThread on your thread while GetEnvironmentVariable is running, which will look like a hang because the call never completes because the thread is frozen.
SuspendThread
But the real question for the customer is, "What sort of problem are you seeing that is manifesting itself in an apparent hang in the GetEnvironmentVariable function?"
The customer was kind enough to elaborate.
We have a global unhandled exception filter in our application so we can log all failures. After we finish logging, we call ExitProcess, but we find that the application never actually exits. If we connect a debugger to the stuck application, we see it hung in GetEnvironmentVariable.
ExitProcess
Your gut response should be, "Holy cow, I'm surprised you even got that far!"
This isn't one of those global unhandled exception filters that got installed because your program plays some really clever game with exceptions, No, this is an "Oh no, my program just crashed and I want to log it" exception handler. In other words, when this exception handler "handles" an exception, it's because your program has encountered some sort of serious internal programming error for which the program did not know how to recover. We saw earlier that you can't do much in a signal handler because you might have interrupted a block of code which was in the middle of updating some data structures, leaving them momentarily inconsistent. But this exception filter is in an even worse state: Not only is there a good chance that the program is in the middle of updating something and left it in an inconsistent state, you are in fact guaranteed that the system is in a corrupted state.
Why is this a guarantee? Because if the system were in a consistent state, you wouldn't have crashed!
Programming is about establishing invariants, perturbing them, and then re-establishing them. It is a game of stepping-stone from one island of consistency to another. But the code that does the perturbing and the re-establishing assumes that it's starting from a consistent state to begin with. For example, a function that removes a node from a doubly-linked list manipulates some backward and forward link pointers (temporarily violating the linked list invariant), and then when it's finished, the linked list is back to a consistent state. But this code assumes that the linked list is not corrupted to begin with!
Let's look again at that call to ExitProcess. That's going to detach all the DLLs, calling each DLL's DllMain with the DLL_PROCESS_DETACH notification. But of course, those DllMain are going to assume that the data structures are intact and nothing is corrupted. On the other hand, you know for a fact that these prerequisites are not met—the program crashed precisely because something is corrupted. One DLL might walk a linked list—but you might have crashed because that linked list is corrupted. Another DLL might try to delete a critical section—but you might have crashed because the data structure containing the critical section is corrupted.
DllMain
DLL_PROCESS_DETACH
Heck, the crash might have been inside somebody's DLL_PROCESS_DETACH handler to begin with, for all you know.
"Yeah, but the documentation for TerminateProcess says that it does not clean up shared memory."
TerminateProcess
Well, it depends on what you mean by clean up. The reference count on the shared memory is properly decremented when the handle is automatically closed as part of process cleanup, and the shared memory will be properly freed once there are no more references to it. It is not cleaned up in the sense of "corruption is repaired"—but of course the operating system can't do that because it doesn't know what the semantics of your shared memory block are.
But this is hardly anything to get concerned about because your program doesn't know how to un-corrupt the data either.
"It also says that DLLs don't receive their DLL_PROCESS_DETACH notification."
As we saw before, this is a good thing in the case of a corrupted process, because the code that runs in DLL_PROCESS_DETACH assumes that your process has not been corrupted in the first place. There's no point running it when you know the process is corrupted. You're just making a bad situation worse.
"It also says that I/O will be in an indeterminate state."
Well yeah, but that's no worse than what you have now, which is that your I/O is in an indeterminate state. You don't know what buffers your process hasn't flushed, but since your process is corrupted, you have no way of finding out anyway.
"Are you seriously recommending that I use TerminateProcess to exit the last chance exception handler?!?"
Your process is unrecoverably corrupted. (This is a fact, because if there were a way to recover from it, you would have done it instead of crashing.) What other options are there?
Quit while you're behind.
My colleague who dabbled in economics when deciding how many lunch vouchers to buy had a number of other money-related quirks.
One of the ones that I remember is that when paying for a purchase, my colleague would double the balance and give the cashier that much money. For example, if the total was $5.20, my colleague would hand over $10.40.
Why?
Just to see if the cashier reacted when pressing the Enter code appeared to have no effect.
Total is $5.20.
Cash tendered is $10.40.
Change is $5.20.
Most of the time, the cashier wouldn't pay any attention. Heck, the cashier wouldn't even question why my colleague handed over such a strange amount of money.
Sometimes my colleague would mix it up and instead add $6.66 to the total. For example, if the total was $5.20, my colleague would hand over $11.86, just to see the cashier's reaction when the cash register indicated that the change due was $6.66.
And then one day, magic happened: The total was $6.66. Without skipping a beat, my colleague handed over $13.32.
Windows Vista includes a tiny command line utility called clip. All it does is paste its stdin onto the clipboard.
clip
dir | clip echo hey | clip
For the opposite direction, I use a little perl script:
use Win32::Clipboard; print Win32::Clipboard::GetText();
Nothing profound today, just a little tip.
My customer is looking out for a way to change the location of the windows.edb file to another (larger) drive.
From the Indexing Options Control Panel, click Advanced, and then under Index location, click Select new.