Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

Browse by Tags

All Tags » Things you shouldn't do.   (RSS)

I can make it arbitrarily fast if I don’t actually have to make it work.

Digging way back into my pre-Microsoft days, I was recently reminded of a story that I believe was told to me by Mary Shaw back when I took her Computer Optimization class at Carnegie-Mellon… During the class, Mary told an anecdote about a developer “Sue” Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 29, 2009 2:49 PM by LarryOsterman | 26 Comments

The story behind the mysterious “Ding” in Windows Vista.

I just ran into this fairly old post on Channel 9.  mstefan reported that his applications played a “Ding” noise when selecting an item in a listview (or tree) control.   It turns out that I’d had the problem independently reported to me by Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 03, 2009 5:29 PM by LarryOsterman | 16 Comments

What’s wrong with this code, part 26 – the answer

Yesterday I posted a code snippet from inside a real piece of code inside the client side of a client/server utility in a Microsoft product. static DWORD WINAPI _PlayBeep(__in void* pv) { UNREFERENCED_PARAMETER(pv); PlaySound(L".Default", NULL, Read More...
Posted Monday, June 29, 2009 11:22 AM by LarryOsterman | 6 Comments

What’s wrong with this code, part 26 – a real-world example

This is an example of a real-world bug that was recently fixed in an unreleased Microsoft product.  I was told about the bug because it involved the PlaySound API (and thus they asked me to code review the fix), but it could happen with any application. Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 25, 2009 12:26 PM by LarryOsterman | 28 Comments

Delay Load is not a good way to check for functionality

On my previous post , Koro made the following comment : “Don't ever check windows versions.  Instead check for functionality being present or not." You can't always do that. Do I want to add a __try/__except to catch delay-load exceptions around Read More...
Posted Friday, March 06, 2009 12:19 PM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments

Checking file versions is surprisingly hard.

I was wandering around the web the other day and ran into this post.  In general I don’t have many issues with the post, until you get to the bottom of the article.  The author mentions that his code only runs on Win7 or newer so he helpfully Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 05, 2009 3:34 PM by LarryOsterman | 28 Comments

PlaySound(xxx, SND_MEMORY | SND_ASYNC) is almost always a bad idea.

Whenever you submit a crash report to OCA , a bug gets filed in the relevant product database and gets automatically assigned to the developer responsible for the code.  I had a crashing bug in the PlaySound API assigned to me.    In this Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 19, 2009 2:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 0 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

I get more spam :)

I just received this phishing letter, I liked it simply because it was so remarkably brazen: -- Dear Webmail User, This message was sent automatically by a program on Webmail which periodically checks the size of inbox, where new messages are received. Read More...
Posted Friday, November 21, 2008 4:58 PM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

What’s wrong with this code, part 25

Wow, 25 already. This one’s pretty straightforward. Once again, it’s a UI issue, since I’ve been spending most of my time doing UI lately. In this particular case, the code comes from the constructor for an auto-layout class that is used internally in Read More...
Posted Monday, November 17, 2008 8:43 AM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments

I get spam :)

I just received this spam message the other day: From: Microsoft [mailto:customerservice@microsoft.com] Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2008 11:13 PM To: Larry Osterman Subject: Security Update for OS Microsoft Windows Dear Microsoft Customer, Please notice Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 14, 2008 9:13 AM by LarryOsterman | 18 Comments

What’s wrong with this code part 24 (From an MSDN article)?

I ran into this bug earlier today and realized that it’d make an awesome “What’s wrong with this code”. I started pulling together a test app when I realized that this MSDN magazine article contains sample code that perfectly exhibits the bug: CRect rectangle; Read More...
Posted Monday, October 06, 2008 4:52 PM by LarryOsterman | 23 Comments

What’s wrong with this code, Part 23 – The Answers

My last post was all about a problem with what appeared to be some really simple ATL code. It turns out that the problem was easier than I had expected.  James Skimming came up with the answer on the second comment.  The problem here was that Read More...
Posted Monday, September 08, 2008 3:19 PM by LarryOsterman | 21 Comments

What’s wrong with this code, Part 23..

I recently tracked down a bug that was causing problems in my code.  Once I figured out the bug, I realized it made a good “what’s wrong with this code”… #include "stdafx.h" #include <mmdeviceapi.h> IMMDeviceEnumerator *GetDeviceEnumerator() Read More...
Posted Friday, September 05, 2008 8:45 AM by LarryOsterman | 26 Comments

What’s wrong with this code, part 22 – Drawing Text…

Recently I’ve been working on something that I’ve never done before in my almost 24 years at Microsoft.    For the past 23ish years, I’ve been a plumber – all the work I’ve done has been under the covers.  But for the next version of Windows, Read More...
Posted Friday, August 01, 2008 3:07 PM by LarryOsterman | 43 Comments
More Posts Next page »
 
Page view tracker