Nothing ventured, nothing gained

Getting ancient remote branches in git

My project has 300+ remote branches for a 100-ish person team. That can't possibly be right. Here's...

Author: Jon Wiswall MSFT Date: 05/11/2015

Stripe-sets via Storage Spaces

I had a bunch of spinning disks sitting around I wanted to stripe together as build output targets....

Author: Jon Wiswall MSFT Date: 05/22/2014

Super-sharpening(?) the image

I may have forgotten to mention it, but my expertise is not in image processing.  The people...

Author: jonwis Date: 07/25/2009

Converting an Image (well, Bitmap really) to Grayscale

First thought – convert the picture to greyscale and increase the contrast to help any kind of...

Author: jonwis Date: 07/18/2009

What's winsxsmanifestcache(something)_blobs.bin?

Glenn writes: "What is the c:\windows\winsxs\manifestcache\6.0.6001.18000_001c50b5_blobs.bin file...

Author: jonwis Date: 01/13/2009

Shipping default values in the registry

Recently, someone asked about how their code should work if a certain configuration setting was...

Author: jonwis Date: 09/03/2008

Deleting from the WinSxS directory

In Windows Vista, the directory %windir%\WinSxS has much stronger protection on it than it did in...

Author: jonwis Date: 01/02/2007

On-demand multhreaded critical section creation

A question came up on an internal newsgroup recently - "How do I do on-demand initialization of...

Author: jonwis Date: 04/27/2006

DLLs and resource ID 2 manifests

Manifests at resource ID 2 help simplify the lives of DLL authors who want to consume side-by-side...

Author: jonwis Date: 01/18/2006

C++ object for activating and Deactivating Contexts

As explained earlier, the activation context system is implemented as a per-thread (or per-fiber)...

Author: jonwis Date: 01/13/2006

Fixing Activation Context Pollution

As the number of apps in the world that use side-by-side activation (as a result of depending on the...

Author: jonwis Date: 01/07/2006

What's that awful directory name under WindowsWinSxS?

As the Visual C++ Runtimes version 8.0 is now a side-by-side component, you may have seen what looks...

Author: jonwis Date: 12/28/2005

Making an MSM from whole cloth – Series Intro

Not too long ago, I was asked to provide a set of merge modules for an external team. The...

Author: jonwis Date: 09/09/2005

Desiging Datastructures for Longevity

One of the more problematic areas of long-lived software is the versioning and updating of shared...

Author: jonwis Date: 08/16/2004

Registration-free applications and components

An area of new technology in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 that didn't get nearly enough...

Author: jonwis Date: 08/07/2004