Regular readers of this blog may remember the giant traditional Swedish Yule Goat erected annually in the Swedish town of Gävle. The Gävle Goat ( Link to article: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251229-01/?p=111929

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A customer wanted to write a process that could detect that it is nearing its job memory limit. Now, if you were asking about system memory limits rather than job memory limits, you would use the Create­Memory­Resource­Notification to create a "low memory" notification. As noted in the documentation, this …

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Commenter Shawn wondered why we are so worried about memory access semantics. Back in my day, we just used full barriers everywhere, and I didn't hear nobody complainin'. Link to article: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251226-00/?p=111919

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I ran across a promotion from a hotel. Join us for the holidays with this promotion code. But if you read down to the fine print, it also says Limited number of rooms available for each date. May not be valid during holiday Link to article: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251225-01/?p=111916

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Just to see what happens, a customer called Set­ClipboardData(CF_TEXT) and passed a memory block that was intentionally not null-terminated. They found that when they subsequently pasted the string (say, into Notepad), the last character didn't get pasted. As a second experiment, they over-allocated the buffer b Link …

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A customer didn't understand why their Win32 accelerator key for Ctrl+M was triggering spuriously. Specifically, it was triggering when the user hit the Enter key, which is nothing like the Ctrl+M two-key combination. They defined their accelerator table like this: IDA Link to article: …

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A colleague of mine who used to work in product support told me that they had a procedure if a customer became irate and demanded to speak with Bill Gates. (This was, of course, back in the days when Bill Gates still ran the company.) The product support technician would apologize for not resolving the problem to the …

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As we close out 2025, we want to pause and reflect on what has been an extraordinary year for the SharePoint Framework (SPFx). We continue to be humbled by the momentum of the platform and the scale of impact it enables across Microsoft 365. Tens of millions of users Link to article: …

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I struggled to get started. For ages, I kept putting off building this website, creating a new programming language for Visual Studio, and coming up with fresh color themes. Each project looked overwhelming, and I couldn’t find the time or motivation to jump in. It all just felt like too much at once. But when a …

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Many languages¹ that have exceptions also have a finally clause, so you can write try { ⟦ stuff ⟧ } finally { always(); } A quick checks shows that this control structure exists in Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, but not C++. C++ says, "We have try...finally at home." Link to article: …

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Delivering high-quality software requires clarity, speed, and collaboration. That’s why we introduced the New Test Run Hub in Azure Test Plans. A modern, streamlined experience designed to make test execution and analysis fast and Link to article: …

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