In the IE7 Beta 2 Preview the UI element that hosts menus and 3rd party toolbars is located between the navigation bar and tabs. However, in this release there's a registry key which you can set to move this to the top of the window instead: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER...

Or: When is 5296 > 5299? Many people who managed to get a hold of the leaked IE7 7.0.5299.0 build may be wondering whether they should uninstall it and switch to the official IE7 Beta2 Preview, which is version 7.0.5296.0. On the surface it seems...

The IE blog has announced the availability of the first public beta for IE7: IE7 Beta 2 Preview . This preview isn't intended to be widely used by the general public, but if you're reading this blog you're probably technical enough to try it. Over...

Using my last example, Stuart Ballard pointed out that using inline returns is another way to avoid the uninitialized variable mistake: if (hwndParent != NULL) { if (fFoo) { return DoOperationWithFoo(hwndParent); } else if (fBar) ...

Here's another micro-optimization that I'm not very fond of. I should note that we don't really obsess about these things too much internally - in general we have established coding practices and only occasionally debate a few debatable things, usually...

In yesterday's post I gave an example of a bug where an attempted micro-optimization combined with a common C++ idiom causes a fairly subtle bug. For those who didn't look long enough to catch it, the flaw was in these two lines: BOOL _fRaining:1; _fRaining...

A lot of things have been said over the years about premature optimization, and after running into the following bug I thought it served as a good example of a type of premature optimization that I call "micro-optimization". That is, doing something quirky...

Last fall I purchased a digital SLR: the popular (and relatively inexpensive) Canon Rebel XT. I had been dabbling with digital cameras for a few years and was having increasing amounts of fun using the limited manual controls of my Canon S50. As a...

Eric Sink has a good article on the process of triaging bugs. In it he pokes a little bit of fun at the people who don't understand why all good software ships with known bugs and then discusses a process for determining which ones to fix. Determining...

In the past I’ve found debugging walkthroughs useful for picking up new techniques. In that spirit here’s a quick rundown of a bug I was investigating today that may have some useful tidbits. This was a crash in IE that involved a toolbar that I...