Tony Schreiner's Blog

One of the great things about Windows is how it works on a wide variety of hardware. After reading a few articles and blog postings from people who have installed Windows 8 on the MacBook Pro with Retina display I’m unable to find an accurate recap, so...

As the Official IE Blog notes, the IE Platform Preview is now available for download. As a graphics enthusiast and a proponent of vector graphics (and fonts , and resolution independent UI in general) over the years I'm thrilled to have moved over...

A post from Raymond Chen today reminds me of the first application compatibility issue I debugged (and fixed). At the time I was working on the MSN client and our team was on loan to load balance compatibility bugs for the release of Windows XP. This...

Yesterday I stumbled across HD View which utilizes the very interesting new HD Photo format plus many other technologies to demonstrate how massive multi-GigaPixel images can be created and hosted on the web. It's a nice viewer reminiscent of Microsoft...

A comment to one of my other posts asked about how to launch IE and open several additional tabs. IE7 does not support specifying multiple URLs on the command line, but another way to do this is to use IE Automation to launch IE as an out-of-proc COM...

My coworker Jeff Davis posted about IE7 and the cyclical nature of blogging, especially for those of us working on things that haven't yet been publicly announced. It includes a great ship analogy, and having been on the "critical path" for most of IE7...

In a previous post I talked about a subtle bug between IE7 and the Office Handwriting recognition service that we discovered too late into IE7 to ship a work-around for, but described how end-users can fix this on their own. However, a couple users have...

As a developer who specializes in client-side applications, I can't help but be amused and somewhat puzzled by some of the types of web-based applications people come up with. A great example are web sites that help resize and crop digital photos. There...

One thing that amused me as I mindlessly surfed the web while stuck in my parents house due to the snowstorm in Colorado was the number of sites that still attempt to show pop-up advertisements -- sites like cnn.com and weather.com, not just shady sites...

Back in college, in 1996 (I believe) I frequently played the pre-release version of SubSpace , a massively multiplayer online game that was originally designed as a project to test the affects of lag over a modem. If I recall correctly, I first played...

While I'm on the subject of COM and extension compatibility, another issue that affected a small number of extensions in IE7 involved passing an interface to a worker thread without first marshalling the interface using CoMarshalInterface() (or the longer...

On Friday I talked about some of the problems with unbalanced CoInitialize() and CoUninitialize() calls and how to debug an unbalanced CoUninitialize inside IE7. At the end I mentioned that using IInitializeSpy in an extension to "fix" an unbalanced init...

First, congratulations to everybody who contributed to the successful launch of the space shuttle Discovery this evening. I watched online via. NASA TV and it's been a long time since I've watched a "live" liftoff. In some recent meetings people have...

During the development of IE7, one problem we discovered was that a small number of extensions have unbalanced CoInitialize() or CoUninitialize() calls. On IE6 they sometimes lucked out, but due to architectural changes in IE7 these would cause crashes...

I'm working on some long-overdue posts about tabbed browsing, but before I get too deep into them what I'd like to know most is: what do you want to know about IE7's tabbed browsing implementation? If you have questions, please post them as comments....

Just before we shipped IE7 we heard sporadic reports of a "Heisenbug" where users would click a tab or click in the address bar, and the IE window would start shaking (or "flickering", or "menus bouncing up and down", depending on how users described...

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...