Larry Osterman's WebLog
Just another Developer Network site
Best Practices for DllMain
DllMain keeps on popping up as a pain point for developers. Heck, just yesterday we found an old bug...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/15/2006
Critical Driver or Cargo Cult Programming?
I've been self hosting Vista on my laptop since sometime in January. Every Monday morning, without...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/14/2006
Making things go fast on a network, part 3
Now I want to pop the stack up a bit and talk about messages. At their heart, connection oriented...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/13/2006
He's Back (for a little bit)
He's back (sort-of). I've been back from vacation for a 2 weeks but I've been a bad blogger...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 06/12/2006
The blog goes dark for a while
I'm chaperoning my son's trip to Washington DC and NYC for the next 10 days, so I'm not going to...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/15/2006
Making things go fast on a network, part 2
Sorry about the delay - I got nailed by a nasty sinus infection on Tuesday night last week that took...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/15/2006
Riffing on Raymond - Network performance...
I keep on doing this, clearly it's evidence of a lack of imagination on my part... Raymond's post a...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/08/2006
"Pippin"at the Fifth
I went to see the 5th Avenue Theater's production of "Pippin" last night. Pretty good production,...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/07/2006
Why are computer games like restaurants?
I was chatting with one of the devs in my group a couple of minutes ago, and we got to talking about...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/05/2006
What's up with Larry not blogging?
<me>Must make time to blog</me> You know it's bad when your co-workers stop by and ask...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 05/04/2006
I could get to like this "Internet" thing.
Last Thursday, when Daniel was at his music lesson, I got an email from a friend of ours. We have a...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 04/20/2006
This one's for you John. The core OS team didn't forget you
Way back when, back in the very early days of this blog (actually it was the 3rd post to my blog), I...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 04/19/2006
The purpose of an operating system, redux
Something changed in the stress mix last week, and I've been swamped with stress failures, that's...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 04/10/2006
Riffing on Raymond - the purpose of an operating system
In Raymond's post today (Adding flags to APIs to work around driver bugs doesn't scale), Raymond...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 04/05/2006
Reorgalicious
Brian Valentine may get all his news from the Official Newspaper of the ExchangeWindows division (no...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 03/24/2006
Why add a throw() to your methods?
Towards the end of the comments in my last "What's wrong with this code" , hippietim asked why I...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 03/22/2006
What's wrong with this code - part 18, bonus answer
So the answer to my bonus question was too easy, "hippietim" figured it out in the first comment....
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 03/21/2006
What's wrong with this code, part 18, plus a bonus bad code
So the last "What's wrong with this code" article was dead easy, I knew it was likely that people...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 03/20/2006
What's wrong with this code, Part 18
This may be the shortest "Bad Code" I've ever done, but it keeps on surprising me how many times I...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 03/17/2006
Another year, another post
Well, this year I didn't miss the anniversary of my first blog post. I still can't quite believe...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 03/15/2006
Fun with names
The other day, someone sent an email to an internal mailing list asking about a "typo" in the...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 03/14/2006
Book Review: Silence on the Wire
For Christmas, Valorie got me a copy of Michal Zalewski's "Silence on the Wire". I have a fair...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 03/10/2006
Audio in Vista, the big picture
So I've talked a bit about some of the details of the Vista audio architecture, but I figure a...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 03/07/2006
Hello Mrs. Osterman
Absolutely nothing technical today, just a shout-out to someone I love :). At some point, about 5 or...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 03/06/2006
Psychic Perf Analysis, or "RegFlushKey actually DOES flush the registry key"
One of Raymond's more endearing features is what he calls "Psychic Debugging", it even made his...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 03/02/2006
Useful service tricks - Debugging service startup
For the better part of the past 15 years, I've been working on one or another services for the...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 03/01/2006
Katamari 'R Filler
For Christmas, we got the kids a PS2, they've been having a great deal of fun with it. On...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 02/28/2006
Threat Modeling, then and now
Way back in the day, back when we were doing the initial threat models for the vista audio stack, I...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 02/27/2006
Suggestion Box
Recreating the suggestion box :) Please note that I reserve the right to choose which suggestions I...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 02/24/2006
The Code Room: Breaking Into Vegas
Sorry about the lack of posts, I've just not been motivated to post recently. Someone pointed out...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 02/24/2006
The Clueless Manifesto
I don't usually echo other people's content, but I ran into this via Scoble: "The Clueless...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 02/21/2006
Why Threat Model?
We're currently in the middle of the most recent round of reviews of the threat models we did for...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 02/13/2006
WFP is my new best friend
I've mentioned our computer setup a couple of times before - Valorie's got her laptop, Daniel,...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 02/07/2006
So apparently there's a "football" game going on this weekend?
I thought we were done with football this year, but apparently not :) Actually, this Superbowl is...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 02/03/2006
What Hath God Wrought
Well, it had to happen. Western Union is finally going out of the telegram business. One of the...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 02/03/2006
Blog Hiccups
Btw, the entire blogs.msdn.com site had an upgrade to a newer version of Community Server last...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 01/30/2006
What's wrong with this code, part 17 - the answer
Yesterday's post discussed a hypothetical API to retrieve data from the registry. The security hole...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 01/30/2006
What's wrong with this code, part 17
Time for another "What's wrong with this code". This time, it's an exercise in how a fix for a...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 01/27/2006
A peek behind the beep
Or rather, a peek behind system sounds. Windows 3.1 (I think - it might have been Win95) introduced...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 01/24/2006
Riffing on Raymond - Splay Trees
Raymond's post today on splay trees (brief summary: splay trees are interesting, but when you do an...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 01/18/2006
Nineteen years ago...
Nineteen years ago today, on a crisp Saturday morning in Scarsdale, NY, Valorie Lynne Holden and...
Author: Larry Osterman [MSFT] Date: 01/17/2006