August 2004 - Posts

• Charles Petzold on book publishing and PC Magazine

  There's an interesting interview with Charles Petzold up on the DotNetRocks site (audio stream: http://perseus.franklins.net//DotNetRocks_0077_Charles_Petzold.asx ) Charles covers a variety of topics, but especially interesting to me was his own struggles Read More... Posted Wednesday, August 25, 2004 5:18 PM by Matt Pietrek | 1 Comments

• Reading another process’s environment

  A reader of my Under The Hood columns writes: I know the PID of a process, I need to get the environment strings of that process. My problem is, the environment string address of each process seems different. If I can get the environment string address Read More... Posted Wednesday, August 25, 2004 1:23 PM by Matt Pietrek | 3 Comments

• My first 'MZ' email!

  Just moments ago, I got my first email from Mark Zbikowski. What an honor! (OK, so it was just a request to pass something along to some folks at my previous company.) Nonetheless, it was a small thrill to see the name in my inbox. If you don't know who Read More... Posted Tuesday, August 17, 2004 4:12 PM by Matt Pietrek | 3 Comments

• Death Metal Parrots, Blues, and Ribs

  Not a bad weekend that just ended. The highlights: Death Metal Parrot - Friday Night, Carrie and I went out to dinner with Pat Styles and his fiancée Lynn. While the drinks and food were great, the thing that stuck out the most was a 7" vinyl disk on Read More... Posted Monday, August 16, 2004 12:27 PM by Matt Pietrek | 6 Comments

• Debugging application startup when you don't directly launch the app

  Out of the blue yesterday an internal MS architect called me in my office (which rarely happens.) They needed to debug a second instance of Windows Media Player which crashed when launched within Internet Explorer. The good old "Attach to process" debugger Read More... Posted Thursday, August 12, 2004 12:42 PM by Matt Pietrek | 10 Comments

• Backyard fun

  A fun day yesterday. Tim Ewald was in town with his wife Sarah and their new son, so we set up a little BBQ at our place. Jason Clarke and his wife Annette also joined us. As an added bonus, moments before Tim & Sarah arrived, we got a call from some Read More... Posted Monday, August 09, 2004 7:16 PM by Matt Pietrek | 3 Comments

• "The latte, it starts to smell after awhile"

  So says our illustrious PM Eric, who's famous for not discarding the used styrofoam cups in his office. The occasion? A going away soirée for a fellow teammate, Simon , who's headed back to England. The turnout was good, much beer was consumed and Read More... Posted Thursday, August 05, 2004 3:41 PM by Matt Pietrek | 1 Comments

• Cool Whidbey debugger feature: Merge Environment

  If your app depends on a particular set of environment variables, it could sometimes be a real pain to debug. Case in point: The .NET profiling API depends on two environment variables to push the unmanaged profiling DLL into a process. I covered this Read More... Posted Wednesday, August 04, 2004 7:57 PM by Matt Pietrek | 8 Comments

• Writing code is the easy part

  Having been at Microsoft for a little over four months now, I've started to get into the swing of the development process here. I've been mostly helping Something I've noticed is that writing code, performance tuning, or debugging is the easy part. However, Read More... Posted Wednesday, August 04, 2004 4:02 PM by Matt Pietrek | 12 Comments

• Michael Geary returns

  What a surprise to find Mike Geary commenting on my C# Iterators blog entry . Back when I was a young pup, I had my set of programming heroes that taught me most of what I know. People like Ray Duncan, Doug Boling, Jeff Prosise and Mike Geary. If you Read More... Posted Tuesday, August 03, 2004 11:58 AM by Matt Pietrek | 2 Comments