Inflating a bicycle tire with a potato

The inimitable Raymond Chen of Old New Thing fame once wrote a blog post about using inappropriate tools for the job. It came to my mind the other day when I needed to do a timestamp-based conditional in a batch file. The underlying cause was rather vanilla - file H is generated from file X, so if file X was modified later than H was, the batch needs to rebuild H.

SEH for fun and profit

PREAMBLE: this technique is no longer necessary. As of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2, one can mix C++ exceptions with SEH.

The built-in crash reporting of Windows Phone 8 sucks. It doesn't report registers, stack, what modules were loaded at crash time... Definitely not something you can debug from.