I think I lost my brain

Man, I'm bad at this

2005-02-23T18:48:00Z

So I've come to the conclusion that I'm a bad blogger. I don't post nearly enough of the copious information that I am privy to every single day. I'm trying to understand why and trying to rationalize my lack of posts but everything just comes out sounding like lame excuses. So I won't give any. I'll just work to do better. Short and sweet appears to be the best mantra. Better to have a short post than no post at all right?

But if you would like to know about some other blogs that are very intersting (to me anyway) and which might be updated a bit more often than mine, then please check these out:

http://blogs.msdn.com/robgruen - for stuff related to ole/com, vb, photography, or whatever
http://blogs.msdn.com/rickrain - ole/com stuff
http://blogs.msdn.com/anantd - remoting, sharepoint, and now COM+ information
http://blogs.msdn.com/onoj - smartclient, smart devices, and just generally cool information

16-bit client app failing after installing Windows XP Service Pack 2 (XPSP2)

2004-11-03T18:01:00Z

So I've been working on a recent escalation case for my team that deals with a 16-bit client application trying to use a 32-bit out of process com server. When the client application would do CoCreateInstance on the server, this would work fine (hr = S_OK) and the out of process com exe would start. However, if the client then did a QueryInterface for a specific interface, it would fail with this HR:

Error Result : 0x80010104   ( -2147417852 )
ID Defined as : RPC_E_FAULT
Error Type : OLE HRESULT Error
Facility : FACILITY_RPC   0x00000001   ( 1 )
Severity : SEVERITY_ERROR   0x00000001   ( 1 )
Code : 0x00000104   ( 260 )
Source Error file : Winerror.h
Message Text : RPC could not call the server or could not return the results of calling the server.

After digging around for a very long time and consulting with our development team, I finally found the solution. There was a change made in xpsp2 that essentially turned off the Universal Proxy Stub (UPS) by default but allowed for it to be turned back on through a registry key. That registry key is:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\OleAut]
"EnableUPS"=dword:00000001

Where do I go from here?

2004-04-09T08:05:00Z

Blogs are just great things. They allow an amazing amount of knowledge sharing in such an interesting and captivating way. I've known about blogs for quite some time now thanks to the evangelism of Dave Winer. Ever since my first diversion to his site I could tell I was hooked. I signed up for the newsletter and have been following ever since. I mean, I feel like I know the guy. I guess that is what makes blogs so dad-gum interesting. You can just start following links and the next thing you know you're off into someone else's world trying to figure out why they have a certain opinion or learning about some new thing that you've never even heard of before. It allows you to hear from people on topics that they are passionate about and with which they know something about (most of the time). It is like being able to get advice from experts on just about anything without even leaving your keyboard...

Which brings me to where I am now. I really don't feel that I'm an expert at much of anything, but I do strive to be. My intention is to post information that I'm privy to here at Microsoft in a way that will help other developers and hopefully make their job easier.

Part of what really got me inspired to create my own blog was Channel9. I think it is great and truly revolutionary. I'm interested in seeing where it goes and I hope to be able to contribute to it in some form or another.

But this blog I will use to collect and share nuggets of information. Not quite sure what those nuggets will consist of yet, but stay tuned...