devblogs.microsoft.com on Hacker News

C++ futures part 1: The mental model(devblogs.microsoft.com)

56 points by ibobev 6 days ago | 11 comments

Raymond Chen's Old New Thing post explaining the shared-state mental model behind C++ std::future, std::promise, and std::async with a simplified implementation.

If somebody tries to hot-patch an already-hot-patched function(devblogs.microsoft.com)

55 points by ibobev 20 days ago | 25 comments

Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing post explaining what happens when someone tries to hot-patch a Windows function that has already been hot-patched.

A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts(devblogs.microsoft.com)

158 points by tybulewicz 1 month ago | 101 comments

A Raymond Chen post on The Old New Thing blog recounting the history of Windows scroll bar operations and shortcuts, including the Windows 7 right-click menu.

Performance Improvements in .NET 11(devblogs.microsoft.com)

330 points by soheilpro 1 month ago | 100 comments

Stephen Toub's annual Microsoft .NET Blog post detailing the performance improvements in .NET 11 across the runtime and libraries.

Why is the x86 undefined instruction called ud2? Why 2?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

245 points by ibobev 1 month ago | 57 comments

What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

338 points by soheilpro 1 month ago | 165 comments

Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing post explaining how Windows XP picked a new user's initial account picture from the default pictures directory.

How do functions like alloca allocate memory from the stack?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

6 points by ibobev 1 month ago | 0 comments

Windows brings out the Rorschach test in everyone (2003)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

331 points by luu 2 months ago | 123 comments

A 2003 Old New Thing post by Raymond Chen recounting how the Windows 95 box's anti-piracy hologram of a baby drew offended reactions despite seeming harmless.

Why Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing that it had Tetris?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

56 points by tybulewicz 2 months ago | 30 comments

How do functions like alloca allocate memory from the stack?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

56 points by ingve 2 months ago | 38 comments

The little-known winstart.bat batch file(devblogs.microsoft.com)

120 points by ingve 2 months ago | 36 comments

TypeScript 7(devblogs.microsoft.com)

670 points by DanRosenwasser 3 months ago | 266 comments

Microsoft Dev Blogs post announcing the release of TypeScript 7.0, a native port of the TypeScript compiler described as 10x faster.

DLL that was not present in memory despite not being formally unloaded(devblogs.microsoft.com)

111 points by ibobev 4 months ago | 39 comments

In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words(devblogs.microsoft.com)

537 points by saikatsg 4 months ago | 94 comments

Raymond Chen's Old New Thing post remembering Tony Krueger, longtime Microsoft Word developer credited with the red and green squiggle underlines.

Understanding the rationale behind a rule when trying to circumvent it(devblogs.microsoft.com)

96 points by tosh 4 months ago | 30 comments

The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation(devblogs.microsoft.com)

465 points by paulmooreparks 4 months ago | 149 comments

Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing post recounting how a Windows x86-32 emulator team, using binary translation, patched badly written application code during emulation.

The back cover of C++: The Language raises questions not answered by front cover(devblogs.microsoft.com)

133 points by paulmooreparks 4 months ago | 43 comments

A discovery about GCC's unidirectional rotation algorithm(devblogs.microsoft.com)

37 points by soheilpro 4 months ago | 12 comments

Intelligent Terminal 0.1(devblogs.microsoft.com)

9 points by jongalloway2 4 months ago | 1 comments

The placeholder name for the Windows 8 experience was "modern"(devblogs.microsoft.com)

26 points by paulmooreparks 4 months ago | 31 comments

Improving C# Memory Safety(devblogs.microsoft.com)

142 points by soheilpro 5 months ago | 31 comments

What is the history of the ERROR_ARENA_TRASHED error code?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

48 points by supermatou 5 months ago | 13 comments

IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields(devblogs.microsoft.com)

314 points by SeenNotHeard 5 months ago | 182 comments

How do I inform Windows that I'm writing a binary file?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

47 points by ingve 5 months ago | 39 comments

Why are there both TMP and TEMP environment variables? (2015)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

186 points by ankitg12 5 months ago | 86 comments

Consequences of passing too few register parameters to a C function(devblogs.microsoft.com)

69 points by aragonite 6 months ago | 25 comments

XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

188 points by ingve 6 months ago | 191 comments

Union types in C# 15(devblogs.microsoft.com)

206 points by 0x00C0FFEE 6 months ago | 184 comments

Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older one(devblogs.microsoft.com)

129 points by michelangelo 7 months ago | 60 comments

TypeScript 6.0 RC(devblogs.microsoft.com)

69 points by johnz 7 months ago | 15 comments

Microspeak: Escrow(devblogs.microsoft.com)

14 points by ibobev 8 months ago | 8 comments

Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed](devblogs.microsoft.com)

265 points by anonymous908213 8 months ago | 158 comments

How did Windows 95 get permission to put Weezer video 'Buddy Holly' on the CD?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

170 points by ingve 8 months ago | 128 comments

F# 10(devblogs.microsoft.com)

110 points by tosh 8 months ago | 20 comments

Swapping two blocks of memory inside a larger block, in constant memory(devblogs.microsoft.com)

35 points by paulmooreparks 9 months ago | 21 comments

Can I throw a C++ exception from a structured exception?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

58 points by birdculture 10 months ago | 13 comments

C++ says “We have try... finally at home”(devblogs.microsoft.com)

126 points by ibobev 10 months ago | 134 comments

Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

281 points by montalbano 10 months ago | 107 comments

Microspeak: North Star – The Old New Thing (2015)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

22 points by rbanffy 10 months ago | 7 comments

When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates(devblogs.microsoft.com)

34 points by magnat 10 months ago | 13 comments

Various locale mismatch scenarios in Windows clipboard text format synthesis(devblogs.microsoft.com)

22 points by ibobev 10 months ago | 7 comments

How does Windows synthesize CF_Unicode­TEXT from CF_TEXT and vice versa?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

3 points by ibobev 10 months ago | 0 comments

How can I read the standard output of an already-running process?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

50 points by ibobev 10 months ago | 24 comments

Uninitialized garbage on ia64 can be deadly (2004)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

79 points by HeliumHydride 10 months ago | 55 comments

Progress on TypeScript 7 – December 2025(devblogs.microsoft.com)

42 points by DanRosenwasser 10 months ago | 12 comments

Reinventing how .NET builds and ships (again)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

179 points by IcyWindows 11 months ago | 88 comments

How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

128 points by ayi 11 months ago | 73 comments

.NET 10(devblogs.microsoft.com)

545 points by runesoerensen 11 months ago | 473 comments

Microsoft .NET Blog post from the .NET Team announcing the release of .NET 10 on November 11, 2025.

The Microsoft SoftCard for the Apple II: Getting two processors to share memory(devblogs.microsoft.com)

94 points by zdw 11 months ago | 50 comments

When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, the video was playing in it(devblogs.microsoft.com)

366 points by birdculture 1 year ago | 64 comments

Raymond Chen's Old New Thing post explaining why a screenshot of a video pasted into Paint on old Windows appeared to keep playing the video.

Why is Windows still tinkering with critical sections? – The Old New Thing(devblogs.microsoft.com)

97 points by OptionOfT 1 year ago | 79 comments

Performance Improvements in .NET 10(devblogs.microsoft.com)

124 points by benaadams 1 year ago | 49 comments

Smarter, workspace-aware code completions for C++ in VS Code(devblogs.microsoft.com)

4 points by mariuz 1 year ago | 0 comments

Abusing copyright strings to trick SW into thinking it's running competitor's PC(devblogs.microsoft.com)

56 points by mastazi 1 year ago | 15 comments

Information has been permanently deleted, for small values of permanently(devblogs.microsoft.com)

45 points by Tomte 1 year ago | 27 comments

Why does C++ think my class is copy-constructible when it can't be?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

50 points by ibobev 1 year ago | 7 comments

Run a C# file directly using dotnet run app.cs(devblogs.microsoft.com)

346 points by soheilpro 1 year ago | 287 comments

Microsoft .NET Blog post announcing that .NET 10 lets developers run a single C# file directly with `dotnet run app.cs`, without a project file.

Edit is now open source(devblogs.microsoft.com)

177 points by ingve 1 year ago | 69 comments

What were the MS-DOS programs that the moricons.dll icons were intended for?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

289 points by rbanffy 1 year ago | 150 comments

Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

475 points by zdw 1 year ago | 266 comments

A post on Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing blog explaining why Windows 7 logons were slower when a solid color desktop background was set.

The case of the UI thread that hung in a kernel call(devblogs.microsoft.com)

128 points by luu 1 year ago | 41 comments

A note on the USB-to-PS/2 mouse adapter that came with Microsoft mouse devices(devblogs.microsoft.com)

349 points by luu 1 year ago | 122 comments

Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing post explaining how the passive USB-to-PS/2 adapter bundled with Microsoft mice worked, with the mouse handling both protocols.

The case of the critical section that let multiple threads enter a block of code(devblogs.microsoft.com)

101 points by luu 1 year ago | 66 comments

A 10x Faster TypeScript(devblogs.microsoft.com)

1699 points by DanRosenwasser 1 year ago | 822 comments

Microsoft TypeScript blog post by Anders Hejlsberg announcing a native port of the TypeScript compiler for roughly 10x faster performance.

Investigating an argument-dependent lookup issue and working around it(devblogs.microsoft.com)

35 points by luu 1 year ago | 1 comments

API design note: Beware of adding an "Other" enum value(devblogs.microsoft.com)

215 points by luu 1 year ago | 109 comments

MSVC Address Sanitizer updates in Visual Studio 2022 version 17.13(devblogs.microsoft.com)

15 points by pjmlp 1 year ago | 0 comments

Did the Windows 95 setup team forget that MS-DOS can do graphics?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

96 points by zinekeller 1 year ago | 32 comments

Why is there a screen that says "It is now safe to turn off your computer"? (2016)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

64 points by susam 1 year ago | 62 comments

A story about USB floppy drives (2004)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

67 points by airhangerf15 1 year ago | 36 comments

Microsoft Go 1.24 FIPS changes(devblogs.microsoft.com)

67 points by ingve 1 year ago | 48 comments

Practical use of the null garbage collector (2018)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

26 points by jasonthorsness 1 year ago | 9 comments

A design flaw in the Windows 3D Pipes screen saver pointed out by a customer(devblogs.microsoft.com)

61 points by paulmooreparks 1 year ago | 10 comments

Deciphering C++ compiler errors: Nonsensical errors from a function declaration(devblogs.microsoft.com)

28 points by signa11 1 year ago | 15 comments

Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

255 points by mooreds 1 year ago | 136 comments

The case of a program that crashed on its first instruction(devblogs.microsoft.com)

87 points by zdimension 1 year ago | 11 comments

What has case distinction but is neither uppercase nor lowercase?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

142 points by thunderbong 1 year ago | 69 comments

What has case distinction but is neither uppercase nor lowercase?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

13 points by epilys 2 years ago | 3 comments

A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase(devblogs.microsoft.com)

180 points by ingve 2 years ago | 191 comments

Why is F# code so robust and reliable?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

56 points by b-man 2 years ago | 35 comments

DirectX Adopting SPIR-V as the Interchange Format of the Future(devblogs.microsoft.com)

138 points by AshleysBrain 2 years ago | 63 comments

Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

185 points by mellonaut 2 years ago | 66 comments

Why did Windows 95 use blue screen error messages instead of hard error messages(devblogs.microsoft.com)

4 points by Tomte 2 years ago | 1 comments

Who Wrote the Blue Screens of Death(devblogs.microsoft.com)

60 points by paulmooreparks 2 years ago | 26 comments

The difference between undefined behavior and ill-formed C++ programs(devblogs.microsoft.com)

19 points by st_goliath 2 years ago | 10 comments

What's the point of std:monostate? You can't do anything with it(devblogs.microsoft.com)

104 points by luu 2 years ago | 141 comments

A prank cursor resulted in an employee being fired before they started (2020)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

54 points by scarmoo 2 years ago | 18 comments

Retirement of Office 365 connectors within Microsoft Teams(devblogs.microsoft.com)

5 points by _lateralus_ 2 years ago | 3 comments

The history of Alt+number sequences(devblogs.microsoft.com)

95 points by ingve 2 years ago | 45 comments

Copy-on-write performance and debugging(devblogs.microsoft.com)

66 points by meysamazad 2 years ago | 30 comments

How to compare two packed bitfields without having to unpack each field (2019)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

73 points by luu 2 years ago | 25 comments

General Availability of .NET Aspire: Simplifying .NET Cloud-Native Development(devblogs.microsoft.com)

16 points by dustedcodes 2 years ago | 5 comments

Subroutine calls in the ancient world, before computers had stacks or heaps(devblogs.microsoft.com)

429 points by signa11 2 years ago | 195 comments

Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing blog post explaining how early computers performed subroutine calls before they had stacks or heaps.

.NET Smart Components(devblogs.microsoft.com)

16 points by soheilpro 2 years ago | 1 comments

If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly(devblogs.microsoft.com)

364 points by AndrewDucker 2 years ago | 271 comments

Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog post on how to implement no-op API stubs correctly, using Windows printing APIs on Xbox as an example.

Sudo for Windows(devblogs.microsoft.com)

526 points by zadjii 2 years ago | 388 comments

Microsoft Windows Command Line blog post announcing Sudo for Windows, letting users run elevated commands from an unelevated console in Windows 11 Insider Preview.

What is a hard error, and what makes it harder than an easy error?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

77 points by luu 2 years ago | 36 comments

A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

113 points by smitop 2 years ago | 79 comments

The SuperH-3, part 1: Introduction (2019)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

67 points by ksec 2 years ago | 28 comments

The case of the vector with an impossibly large size(devblogs.microsoft.com)

55 points by signa11 2 years ago | 30 comments

Hardware Intrinsics in .NET 8(devblogs.microsoft.com)

98 points by GordonS 2 years ago | 31 comments

The mysterious second parameter to the x86 ENTER instruction(devblogs.microsoft.com)

130 points by matt_d 2 years ago | 36 comments

Saving CO2 using location and time shifting in Azure(devblogs.microsoft.com)

26 points by komape 2 years ago | 15 comments

Why doesn't Windows have an "expert mode"? (2003)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

40 points by scaglio 2 years ago | 34 comments

.NET 8(devblogs.microsoft.com)

186 points by runesoerensen 2 years ago | 167 comments

Why does unsafe multithreaded std:unordered_map crash more than std:map?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

81 points by luu 3 years ago | 62 comments

A new F# compiler feature: graph-based type-checking(devblogs.microsoft.com)

173 points by soheilpro 3 years ago | 100 comments

Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware(devblogs.microsoft.com)

833 points by mycall 3 years ago | 484 comments

Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog post arguing that overly aggressive uninstallers end up behaving like malware on Windows.

What happens when you shift a register by more than the register size?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

90 points by signa11 3 years ago | 58 comments

DOS/4GW made Windows 95 game compatibility easier, but with higher stakes(devblogs.microsoft.com)

224 points by zdw 3 years ago | 79 comments

STL: The Vector(devblogs.microsoft.com)

25 points by signa11 3 years ago | 4 comments

Before you try to do something, make sure you can do nothing(devblogs.microsoft.com)

175 points by Sindisil 3 years ago | 70 comments

The great Polish Sea or We forgot Poland (2006)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

116 points by Tomte 3 years ago | 25 comments

Microsoft opens MIDI 2.0 repo(devblogs.microsoft.com)

127 points by anigbrowl 3 years ago | 49 comments

Visual Studio’s IntelliSense list can now steer GitHub Copilot code completions(devblogs.microsoft.com)

88 points by samwillis 3 years ago | 11 comments

Buying an entire Egghead Software store (2005)(devblogs.microsoft.com)

60 points by kaladin-jasnah 3 years ago | 17 comments

What's up with this new memory_order_consume memory order?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

57 points by luu 3 years ago | 36 comments

TypeScript team released an explorer for performance tuning(devblogs.microsoft.com)

76 points by aabbcc1241 3 years ago | 28 comments

How is it even possible to cheat on a musical performance practical exam?(devblogs.microsoft.com)

175 points by scns 3 years ago | 158 comments

C++17 creates a practical use of the backward array index operator(devblogs.microsoft.com)

77 points by nikbackm 3 years ago | 21 comments