It seems like Microsoft’s typical entry into a market goes something like this. It sees an interesting market built up by someone else, and releases a product in that space. The product is crap compared to the existing market leader. Microsoft revs the product a few times until it is competitive, and uses whatever means available to push it. Then, they release something that is actually good, the former market leader starts to crumble, and Microsoft dominates. Then, Microsoft, having won the war, lets their product rot. Examples? Visual Studio over Borland development tools (though Java has spurred competition again), Internet Explorer over Netscape, Office over WordPerfect, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve made some effort to understand the differences between the Struct Member Alignment compiler option /Zp, #pragma pack and __declspec(align()) with Microsoft Visual C++ in light of an odd bug that ultimately was caused by inconsistent packing options between compilation units. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote DeskMinder as a Christmas gift for my family and friends. It originated as just a bit of HTML and JavaScript as an Active Desktop component for reminding me when special occasions were drawing near, like family members’ birthdays and anniversaries. To make it easier to customize the events, I wrote a Windows Forms event editor that goes along with it. Read the rest of this entry »