It’s been a little while since I had a “nice” application problem to blog about. It’s weird but I actually enjoy looking into those issues, well probably means I’m weird which is probably right.

I use a Virtual Desktop as my primary work desktop since my day 1 at work (and all the day 1’s after).

I like it because of the flexibility it gives me to work on any device and I also feel it’s that “drinking your own Champagne” is the very best way to really see if something is good!

Today I needed to write some notes and I wanted to use Quip for that but I’ve been having intermittent issues with the Quip Desktop app. I would launch and simple show a white screen with a stalled busy indicator.

Like most persons do, I ignored it and continued in the browser version for a while but as I don’t really like to have applications in a browser (hidden between 104 other tabs) I decided I would no longer “take” this and dived into it.
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I will explain why in a seperate post, but on my MacBook Pro I wanted to use the Intel Thunderbolt driver under BootCamp instead of the ones supplied by Apple.

The Thunderbolt control program however refused with the following error message:

It’s really beyond me why Intel would deliberately block their Thunderbolt software on Apple hardware (under Windows). Believing this was just a simple hardcoded hardware check rather than any hardware issue that would prevent the drivers to work I proceeded into finding where the check takes place.

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I write most of my code in unmanaged languages such as Delphi and C/C++. Sometimes customers ask me to interface my code to their .net code in which case I create a dll for them.

A recurring thing is that I need to return string to .net.

There are many ways to do this of course but in all cases we need to manage memory: who will allocate the memory for the string and who is responsible for freeing it?

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I don’t do much programming in .NET based languages but I have to for some things like the Windows Live Writer plugin I am creating.

I didn’t expect this but the String.IndexOf Method is by default case sensitive.

But we can make it case insensitive if we use one of the overloads: IndexOf(String, StringComparison).

Example: