HARI MAHADEVAN (何瑞理)

In the last two days, I have been twice bitten by the loose nature of legacy C++ language. I had developed a base class that abstracts the core features of a module a year back. The class itself was a great success. Since developing it for a specific module, I successfully refactored another module to use this and was able to do so in a relatively short window of 1 week. This is the background. Recently, I had an opportunity to re-use this class for another module and having been successful earlier twice, I guess I was a little callous in using it without referring to the accompanied documentation. The design requires that I override a bunch of methods and admittedly I was as little cocky -- if I had designed and implemented it earlier, it should be a snap for me to re-use it. So I wrote the code, compiled it, removed a few syntax errors and dropped it into test. All good, except that couple of overridden methods were not being invoked! WTF? It also so happened that the call...

For the past couple of weeks, I have been working on something that I thought I had left behind a long time ago, a very long time ago -- a windows device driver! I had launched my career writing drivers, first for OS/2 and then eventually for Windows. When I say Windows, I'm referring to Windows NT 3.51. That's correct, NT 3.51! And here's a surprise, the first Windows NT driver that I worked on ran on PowerPC platform! IBM was readying their new state-of-the-art PC platform and to play it safe wanted to give the user the choice of platforms to run -- OS/2 and Windows NT. Being a new platform, the toolsets were not quite as well developed as they were for the more contemporary and stable x86. WinDBG (a far cry from the WinDBG of these days) had issues syncing the source line information in the PDB with the actual source files. Quite often I had to resort to using the disassembly to isolate the root cause and fix it. Another challenge that I faced then was that the x86 ...