Echobit

I was in Redmond last week with Ken And Steve to attend Microsoft’s DriverDeveloper Conference (DDC). When registering on the first day, we all received these small laptop bags. At some point I was just toying around with mine and my eye caught onto the handle of the zipper: Read more…

A while ago, a friend of mine discovered an interesting discrepancy in how the Visual Studio debugger shows local variables in relation to for-loops. When he demonstrated the issue, I decided to investigate the problem a little further.

To start things off, consider the following code snippet:

void SomeFunction()
{
    for (int i = 0; i < 1; ++i);

    for (int i = 0; i < 1; ++i);
}

The function above contains two for-loops that do absolutely nothing useful (unless you consider looping useful). What makes these two for-statements interesting, though, is how they both use an iterator variable named i. According to the C standard (C98), i is local to the for-statement in which it is defined. That is, code outside the scope of the for-statement cannot access i. Read more…

No matter how long you’ve been programming, you’re bound to hit a problem at some point which takes you multiple hours or days to fix, and which turns out to be a simple mistake on your part. This post is the first in a new series I’ll be writing on stupid programming mistakes I’ve made in the past (and that I’m not particularly proud of).

A couple of days ago, I hit a problem when testing the LAN Bridger central server, which is hosted on a Linux box. I do most of my development and testing on Windows, though, so as a result the LAN Bridger server runs on both Windows and Linux for ease of debugging. From time to time, and especially toward the end of a release cycle, I typically have to compile and test the server thoroughly on Linux to make sure everything works.

I usually do all of my testing with debug builds (contrary to Ken’s beliefs). Once I’m sure everything runs smoothly and I don’t get any assertions or erratic behavior, I turn to release builds. In this particular case, the server worked flawlessly for debug builds, but exhibited a rather strange behavior for release builds. Read more…

Coding style is very sensitive subject. The war on Hungarian notation, for instance, has been going on for ages and is still very much alive.

A few days ago I stumbled upon Herb Sutter’s latest remarks on his personal preference and some of the comments to his post sparked my interest. Read more…

I recently talked about how third-party applications sometimes have a bad influence on other applications. In this post, I’ll continue that series.

I just got a new laptop from work preloaded with the usual stuff such as an office suite and antivirus software. I tend to prefer manually installing only the software I need when I get my hands on a new computer, but since this was for work I was pretty limited in what I was allowed to do with it. So, I just shed a tear and then went along pretending I was happy.

Not surprisingly, it didn’t take long before I started noticing problems. Read more…