Entries tagged with ale contenti - Channel 9

David LeBlanc: Inside SafeInt

Charles — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:34:00 GMT

SafeInt is a C++ header containing the SafeInt class, non-throwing functions to check common operations, and the associated internal mechanisms. SafeInt is currently used extensively throughout Microsoft, with substantial adoption within Office and Windows.

David LeBlanc is a software engineer and security expert. You may know him from the Writing Secure Code books. David and Michael Howard have helped raise the bar for software security inside Microsoft for several years now. David has mostly remained out of the limelight since he's much more interested in writing secure code than talking about writing secure code. Well, now David's going to be famous. Sorry, David. :)

The great Ale Contenti joins us in this conversation to provide some context and ask some hard questions. Ale is a dev lead on the C++ libraries team. You've seen him a few times on 9. As you can imagine, he probably uses SafeInt in his own work.

Here, we dig into the thinking behind SafeInt, how it works, how it's composed, when to use it, when not to use it and how it will evolve to meet new demands and support other compilers (SafeInt now supports gcc). Enjoy!

Ale Contenti and Louis Lafreniere: Understanding Exceptions and When/How to Handle Them

Charles — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:47:00 GMT

Sometimes, things go wrong when code executes. You can't predict when this will happen or even why, but you can write code to handle exceptional problems. If you're lucky, the problem will carry with it a bunch of useful information that you can use, at runtime, to handle the specific error. These exceptional information structures are called structured exceptions; blobs of bad news carrying useful and specific information that you can use to find your way out of the exceptional rabbit hole. Of course, with useful data packaged up in an exception you can more easily debug to find root causes, which is much harder to do with, say, error codes...

What is a structured exception, exactly? How should you handle exceptions that you don't assume will arise during the execution of your code? What are the correct patterns of exception handling that you can safely rely on? What does the C++ compiler have to do with exception code patterns?

Come along for ride into the deep and murky world of exceptions with some folks that truly understand them at the most fundamental levels.

Ale Contenti is a senior development lead in the C++ base class libraries team. Louis Lafreniere is a principal software developer in the C++ compiler group. Here, Ale and Louis teach us about exceptions and handling them (and when not to handle them). I love talking to the VC++ People. They live on the metal and really understand the fascinating intracacies of our platform.

Enjoy this latest Going Deep episode.

Ale Contenti: VC++ Safe Libraries and More

Charles — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:23:00 GMT

Ale Contenti is a Senior Development Lead on the VC++ team. He works primarily on Safe Libraries and associated constructs. Here, we learn about what's new in VC SL (checked iterators are certainly cool - and fast too), things to think about in terms of writing "safe" C++, future thinking in this area, and how to write a useful and performant C++ program without using pointers explicitly.

VC++ continues to evolve...

Enjoy.