Windows

I once wanted to show a colleague a piece of code I had written some time ago back when MS-DOS 5.0 and 486's were the big deal. It was a small assembly routine that loaded an image and rotozoomed it, like the effect seen in Future Crew's Second Reality. Only problem is that the program would no longer run under Windows XP or newer because of the custom VGA video mode that was used. So, I thought how hard could it be to write it for Windows and still be realtime? This is a classic nerd snipe. I couldn't stop working on the concept and no other work was getting done!

I haven't posted in a while, so I wanted to get back into a routine by sharing this tidbit.

A common task a developer may encounter is the need to find out what security group a user is a member of. This is critical information for an app to utilize a role-based authorization mechanism in web apps, client/server apps, login scripts, etc. When querying LDAP, this is as easy as enumerating the 'memberOf' attribute of the user account, right?

...no matter what try/catch I put in my user code, I couldn't catch this exception with the debugger. Visual Studio would halt execution every time with "Exception unhandled by user code"...

There may be a day when Microsoft realizes that rebooting a server after trivial security updates is too much hassle. Or, that undistinguished, yet business critical, third party application's memory leak just never gets fixed, forcing you to reboot weekly to prevent an outage. As a Windows sysadmin, unless you plan on migrating all your server applications to Unix, you're stuck rebooting your servers periodically. I came up with a way to issue reboots via ad-hoc or a scheduling tool to remotely reboot servers and ensure they are back online.

I recently found the need to configure Outlook 2003 for thousands of corporate users to use preferred address book settings instead of the defaults. As anyone in a large corporate environment may know, the defaults are set such that when composing an email, name resolution checks all address lists in Exchange in alphabetical order by list, then name. When an organization is many tens of thousands large, resolving "Smith" will inevitably find conflicts.

One of the greatest ideals of high level programming is the idea of code reuse. In the old days, this was only ever done using functions or subroutines, depending on the language. In later days, this was performed as object oriented design. Every language seems to accomplish these ideals in various ways to accomplish a similar goal.