Periodically all us need some time to relax and recharge. Some people would like to travel somewhere, some would like to have a party, but most common way is watching TV. You forgot about your problems, you see people on TV that have much bigger problems than yours, you see people doing some stupid things etc. As variant you can go to movie, rent movie etc.

But there are growing thing that previously only used by teenagers but now going to older people and even to senior people as well. I’m talking about computer games.

Let’s compare them. Firstly, compare how you are consuming movies and games.

Most computers games are like movie, but you are not consuming content, you

One of the best features of Windows 10 that you can scroll any window with mouse wheel by just moving mouse over that window and using mouse wheel. You don't need to click on that window to activate it like in previous version of Windows.

Previously I had to use some program that do the same and unfortunately sometimes it creates issues.

One of complications for STA COM interfaces that they have thread affinity and any function from that interface should be called only from that thread. For example, imagine that main thread actively using some COM interfaces. And in some moment GC thread started to release unused interfaces.

But GC cannot call Release function of that interface in GC finalizer thread. GC thread should switch to main thread to call Release. This is quite slow and main thread could be busy. In case when there are a lot of interfaces went on .NET side it can create huge queue of interfaces waiting for their release and there could be some other objects waiting for finalizer to be called.

As mitigate that,

Another thing that developer should be aware when consuming COM interface is apartment. It is quite long topic and I will not explain it in detail. For today discussion let’s talk about STA. If you never use COM interface in .NET from different threads you can ignore this post.

STA means single thread apartment. Normally main thread has STA. COM interface that arrives to .NET runtime usually will be marked as STA. It means that that COM interface will be used only from thread it originally passed to. It called thread affinity. There are ways to change that behavior, but it will be in later posts.

As result when you call any function on STA COM interface and current thread is not one that originally received that interface then .NET runtime will attempt to switch to that thread.

COM in .NET is very tricky to do properly, and it is source of a lot of confusions. It is quite extensive area and I will try to explain stuff I learnt from it. I would like to mention that all that I got from practice and from exploring source code of CLR and call stacks in WinDbg. But some conclusions could be wrong so use it at own risk.

Firstly, we have to start with basics. Let’s talk about case when .NET code consumes some external COM object.

.NET cannot consume COM interfaces directly, so when COM interface crosses .NET boundary runtime will create special structure called Runtime Callable Wrapper (RCW for short) and .NET native objects (it called

I’m finishing setting up new computer and installed Skype. After I launched it I thought I ran Skype modern app. But after some time, I realized that I installed correct version.

And honestly new version is disaster. If you don’t believe me search internet. And for now let’s go in details.

As beginning I would like to state that I’m using Skype more than 10 years and I was quite happy user even when they were massive connectivity issues. I know many places where Skype is “company” messenger. I used it quite extensively.

First and most important feature for me, it is not possible anymore to have a chat with every person in own window. Pervious every chat was in

If you are computer enthusiast, you probably heard about overclocking. Basically, overclocking is making some part of your computer works faster than it set by manufacturer. Usually people overclock CPU, memory, video cards.

There two questions why they doing that and why it is possible?

Let’s start from why it is possible. Usually manufacturer test chip for its performance. There are higher quality chips and lower quality. Obviously higher quality chips can perform faster or fully. Less quality chips failed some checks but can perform at lower speeds or became less functional product. For example, for CPU if it failed to work say at 4 GHz it can work as say 3 Ghz. Or if it fails to work as

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  • Edge

Today I would like to talk about browser from Microsoft called Edge. Many of you are using Windows 10 and Edge is default system browser.

Microsoft released Windows 10 3 years ago. And they started to develop Edge probably like 2 years before release date. It is around 5 years of development. And it still fails to work properly. And I’m not talking about rendering or similar things. They are fine. I don’t even remember if I every had any issues with any website. But application itself drive me nuts.

When they release Windows 10 I was using Edge a lot, so Microsoft will have chance to collect all information and I hopped they will fix it soon. It didn’t

I finished setting up Windows with all apps and found this:

And there is Solitare as well but it least it is Microsoft game.

Seriously? I bought my Windows 10 and you trying to make more money out of it by installing some bloatware? And we talking about 1Gb of games.