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Fixing an accessibility bug with the trackbar common control

The trackbar common control is a strange beast. The trackbar can be oriented either horizontally or vertically. On LTR language machines, when the trackbar is horizontal, it works much as you’d expect it to: The minimum value of the trackbar is on the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 27, 2009 5:17 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

Fixing a customer problem: “No Audio Device is Installed” when launching sndvol on Windows Vista

Yesterday someone forwarded me an email from one of our DirectShow MVPs – he was having problems playing audio on his Windows Vista machine.   Fortunately David (the MVP) had done most of the diagnostic work – the symptoms he saw were that he was Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 06, 2009 11:26 AM by LarryOsterman | 18 Comments

FPO

I was chatting with one of the perf guys last week and he mentioned something that surprised me greatly. Apparently he's having perf issues that appear to be associated with a 3rd party driver. Unfortunately, he's having problems figuring out what's going Read More...
Posted Monday, March 12, 2007 9:44 AM by LarryOsterman | 22 Comments

Why was the ability to specify an allocator during CoInitialize removed from the system?

Yesterday I talked about CoGetMalloc . One thing I didn't include was why the ability to specify an allocator was removed from the system. If you've read Raymond's blog, the answer should be obvious. I suspected it, but wasn't sure, but after I submitted Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 08, 2007 12:30 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

The Sad Story of CoGetMalloc

Ok, I admit it. I'm a geek. I'm actually one of those people who rants over the loss of the printed version of the platform SDK documentation (I still have some of the original Win32 Platform SDK documents in my office and use them regularly). One of Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 07, 2007 10:39 AM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

Best Practices for DllMain

DllMain keeps on popping up as a pain point for developers. Heck, just yesterday we found an old bug where a component was calling CoFreeUnusedLibraries in its DllMain function. So it was really cool that this morning I came in and discovered an email Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 15, 2006 10:15 AM by LarryOsterman | 19 Comments

WFP is my new best friend

I've mentioned our computer setup a couple of times before - Valorie's got her laptop, Daniel, Sharron and I each have our own desktop computers, and there are a couple of other machines floating around the house. Since the kids machines don't have internet Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 07, 2006 9:34 AM by LarryOsterman | 31 Comments

Windows Audio Channel9 Video is up.

Robert Scoble's posted the audio team Channel9 video , in it, the GPM for our group goes over what the Windows Core Audio team's been doing for the past three or so years, and lays out some of the stuff that we've got in store for Vista. I am super psyched Read More...
Posted Friday, September 16, 2005 10:43 AM by LarryOsterman | 16 Comments

Michael's finally writing the nitty gritty details of DllLoad

I don't normally post on weekends, but I just noticed that Michael Grier 's finally started posting his " How does the NT loader work " series. His second post, on the basic operation of the loader is also up. Michael sent out a doc internally on Thursday Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 18, 2005 1:04 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

The dirty little secret of Windows volume

Here's a dirty little secret about volume in Windows. If you look at the documentation for waveOutSetVolume it very clearly says: Volume settings are interpreted logarithmically. This means the perceived increase in volume is the same when increasing Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 16, 2005 12:07 PM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments

Mapping audio topologies to mixer topologies

Yesterday , I described the internal topology of an audio card. But there's no Windows API to expose that topology directly (you can generate the topology using the KS IOCTLs (KS stands for Kernel Streaming) but the reality is that it's not an API for Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 14, 2005 12:47 PM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments

What's in your audio card?

No, it's not a credit card (obscure reference to a current credit card campaign running here in the US). One of the things that really surprised me when I joined this group is the complexity of an audio adapter. I had figured that an audio adapter was Read More...
Posted Monday, June 13, 2005 7:06 PM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments

So how do I play sounds anyway?

Well, the answer to that is WAY more complicated than I can answer, there are LOTs of different ways, and I’m not qualified to talk about most of them. But I can talk about some of the easier ways to make noises. The first, and simplest one is PlaySound Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 27, 2004 7:03 PM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

The consequences of ignoring nagling and delayed acks

Over most of this week, I’ve discussed how ignoring the underlying network architecture can radically hurt an application . Now it’s time for a war story about how things can go awry if you don’t notice these things. One of the basic Read More...
Posted Friday, August 06, 2004 5:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments
 
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