Larry Osterman's WebLog
Just another Developer Network site
Hey, I'm an author too!
Joel just sent me an email letting me know that the first edition of "Best Software Writing, I" has...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/20/2005
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...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/18/2005
Nathan's laws of software
Way back in 1997, Nathan Myhrvold (CTO of Microsoft at the time) wrote a paper entitled "The Next...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/17/2005
The dirty little secret of Windows volume
Here's a dirty little secret about volume in Windows. If you look at the documentation for...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/16/2005
What's in an audio volume?
I've been talking about audio controls - volumes and mutes and the like, but one of the more...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/15/2005
Mapping audio topologies to mixer topologies
Yesterday, I described the internal topology of an audio card. But there's no Windows API to expose...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/14/2005
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...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/13/2005
Venting steam
Ok, today I'm going to vent a bit... This has been an extraordinarily frustrating week (that's a...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/10/2005
Hacking Billy
I love it when I come into work in the morning and I find something in my email that just screams...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/09/2005
The Endian of Windows
Rick's got a great post on what big and little endian are, and what the Apple switch has to do with...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/07/2005
When new features expose old bugs.
Not quite "Riffing on Raymond" but he just wrote about this, and it reminded me of a story that was...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/06/2005
Error Code Paradigms
At some point when I was reading the comments on the "Exceptions as repackaged error codes" post, I...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/02/2005
My favorite error code
Yesterday I'd mentioned X.400 OM error codes. Originally, the primary message transport for Exchange...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/01/2005
Exceptions as repackaged error codes
One of the comments on my philosopy of error codes post from last week indicated that all the...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/31/2005
No post today, prepping for my presentation :(
And community server seems to believe that I need to provide content. So, to make it happy, I'll...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/27/2005
Why does Windows share the root of your drive?
Out-of-the box, a Windows system automatically shares the root of every hard drive on the machine as...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/26/2005
How do you know what a particular error code means?
So you're debugging your program, and all of a sudden you get this wierd error code - say error...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/25/2005
How do you know what a particular error code means?
So you're debugging your program, and all of a sudden you get this wierd error code - say error...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/25/2005
Error Codes, again...
One of the tech writers in my group just asked a question about documenting error codes. I've...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/24/2005
Larry's Rules of software engineering, Part 4 - Writing servers is easy, writing clients is HARD.
Over the past 20 years or so, I've written both (I wrote the first NT networking client and I wrote...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/23/2005
My New Monitor's Here! My New Monitor's Here!
With apologies to Steve Martin. I just got my new monitor (after the whole Office Move thingy I...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/19/2005
More CD Audio Trivia
A Co-worker pointed this out to me: https://www.cdrfaq.org/faq02.html#S2-29: The general belief is...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/18/2005
Grocery Wars
While we were going to the lecture on Monday, Todd Bowra mentioned a Star Wars parody called...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/18/2005
Why I removed the MSN desktop search bar from IE
I was really quite excited to see that the MSN Desktop Search Team had finally released the final...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/16/2005
What's wrong with this code, part 12 - Retro Bad Code Answers
In the last article, I looked at a prototype code snippet to enter a system call. But the code had a...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/16/2005
What's wrong with this code, part 12 - Retro Bad Code
I was at a security tech talk last week discussing some fascinating stuff, and it reminded me of an...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/13/2005
End of Life Issues
Wow. Yesterday I asked y'all when it was ok to end-of-life an API. I'm astonished at the quality of...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/12/2005
Turning the blog around - End of Life issues.
I'd like to turn the blog around again and ask you all a question about end-of-life issues. And no,...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/11/2005
SPOILER WARNING ABOUT THE AMAZING RACE - Yes, there is justice in the world...
Massive Edit: Spoiler Warning (Sorry about that - I figured front page on MSNBC.COM was enough :()...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/11/2005
Threat Modeling, Part 3 - Process
Continuing the discussion on threat modeling that I started in this post (and continued in this...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/10/2005
Moving offices - again
Editors Note: This was posted last Thursday evening, and was promptly lost in a blog rollback....
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/09/2005
Playing audio CDs, part 11 - Why isn't my sample ready for prime time?
As I mentioned in my previous post, the code I've provided will play back audio CDs. But it's not...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/06/2005
Playing Audio CDs, part 10 - Glitch Free, Low Memory
So yesterday I wrote an example that removed the glitching from my DAE CD playback example. But it...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/05/2005
Microsoft Careers - Meet Our People: Larry
Dare and KC have already mentioned this, but... They've just updated the Microsoft Careers "Meet our...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/02/2005
Playing Audio CDs, part 7 - DAE Table of contents.
So now this series comes to the "fun" part, DAE. DAE stands for "Digital Audio Extraction", it means...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/02/2005
What's actually on an audio CD?
Before I can talk about reading audio CDs using DAE (Digital Audio Extraction), I need to talk a bit...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 04/29/2005
So what's wrong with DRM in the platform anyway?
As I said yesterday, it's going to take a bit of time to get the next article in the "cdrom...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 04/28/2005
Playing audio CDs, part 6 - MCI Command playback
Today, we play the actual audio track on the CD using the MCI commands. HRESULT...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 04/27/2005
More surrealism
So I'm in a training course this afternoon. And the guy in front of me is surfing the web on his...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 04/26/2005
Playing a CD, part 5 - MCI commands.
I'm almost done with the easy part of the "playing a CD" series. Today, we'll look at the other half...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 04/26/2005
Playing Audio CDs, part 4 - MCI Playback.
The other day, I wrote about dumping the track database on an audio using the MCI string command...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 04/25/2005
Playing Audio CDs, part 3 - MCI
Today, I want to talk about one of the most weird and wonderful APIs in all of Windows. It's also...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 04/22/2005
Surreal drive time
Every morning, I take Daniel to school. He goes to school in Edmonds, which is about 20 minutes...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 04/21/2005