The Secret History of Windows Task Manager from Retired Microsoft Engineer | Hacker News Reader

The Secret History of Windows Task Manager from Retired Microsoft Engineer

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73 pointsguiambros25 comments

> I was pulled aside into the "big glass room" for additional questioning. After reviewing my application, as my new bride looked on from afar, the Immigration officer was yelling at me, turning red, and waving his arms. He was very upset and animated, and from her vantage point it was clear that we were being denied entry and that my Microsoft dreams were crashing down around us right then and there. What she didn't know, because she couldn't hear, was that he had already long since approved my work Visa!

> He was actually upset because their copy of Microsoft Word printed a blank page at the end of every one of their documents and it was wasting paper and he wanted it fixed. I did my best to help configure their page margins before we were released to our new life in America!

Reminds me of a Douglas Adams novel where the protagonist tells the police officer that the computer they are trying to use never worked and it's not their fault. The police officer is very happy and tells him they have been using the machine to bludgeon suspects with.

Also:

Part 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UduzUmetP4

Part 3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyJw2MumgTQ

In Part 3, he's displaying the code in Visual Studio Code on macOS. I like his sense of humor, and I wonder if that is part of a joke.

Not really... since they nuked Movie Maker, I moved to Final Cut on the Mac!

Semi-offtopic: did anyone else find that Task Manager reset itself to its default (compact) form after a recent update to Windows 10?

It seems to reset itself any time there's an unclean shutdown, so it resetting itself after an update doesn't seem surprising.

Yes, happened to me on three different machines with the 20H2 update.

One of the most horrendous UX design picks in Windows 10, I immediately switched to ProcessHacker the moment I saw it.

How does ProcessHacker compare to Process Explorer? From my quick look, they appear to have mostly the same features.

At some point Process Explorer started recording the CPU/memory usage graphs for a process only the moment you opened the details window for that particular process for the first time.

So even if Process Explorer had been running in background all the time, you could no longer inspect a process's CPU/memory usage history after the fact if you hadn't by chance already opened its details window before.

As the last version (I might have even asked on the forum about it, but never got a definitive response whether this was intentional or a bug) of Process Explorer that didn't exhibit this annoying new behaviour stopped working after switching to Windows 10, I switched to ProcessHacker at that point.

I've initially missed Process Explorer's miniature system information diagrams in the toolbar a little, but otherwise I've been happy with ProcessHacker.

Oh yeah, that's a tour de force of UI design! Geebuk.

could have just double clicked it

By today's standards the code of the old task manager (as most of the code in Windows) is a big pile of stinking Underfined Behavior.

For example:

    void COptions::SetDefaultValues() {
        ZeroMemory(this, sizeof(COptions));

is a great way to overwrite a vtbl pointer and end up with a invalid object state. There is a safe and perfectly Standard compliant way to reset the object to its default state: `*this = COptions()`

Ah a little knowledge is an entertaining thing. What does the V in VTBL stand for, I wonder? There's your hint.

Is there a problem in the case it's sure that COptions objects never have vtbl pointer?

Does watching this pose a risk to being allowed to work on wine?

Just started part 1, but part 2 apparently shows the source code.

Edit: Part 1 is his personal journey of starting work at MS and how he got into making Task Manager. It's safe.

Edit 2: Actually not really anything in the way of source in part 2. But he promises code for part 3.

Part 3 shows the source code, in case you're concerned about it. It's just a few pages of C++ written 20 years ago, so unlikely that any lawyer would have any claim even in their wildest dreams, but stay clear of you want to have 100% plausible deniability. Parts 1 and 2 are clean.

ps: standard IANAL disclaimer.

Only if you believe in such things...

The risk is real. The only thing protecting wine and reactos from being sued to death by microsoft is that they can claim clean room design. If one of their watched a video explaining how windows works, it would make that defense illegible.

I guess it's more about the actual source code. I'd expect that just hearing "how" something works can still allow you to do a "clean room" in a sense that most of the algorithms aren't secret and a lot of "how" is obvious to the experienced practitioners just from the description of the behavior.

His eyes' movement is bothering me. Is he reading a script on his screen?

No, I'm slowly scanning the room for John Connor.

Probably, the subtitles on the videos seem to have a lot of additional dialogue he cut out.

Coles was a popular Canadian bookstore chain, for those unaware.

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