Output Stream of Consciousness

Yesterday, I had a pretty weird experience with Windows XP that gave me a bit of grudging respect for the OS, despite my general distrust of things that look like Lego but aren't :)

I was trying to put together a demo program for my upcoming presentation at our user group, all about concurrency.

Specifically, I was trying to demostrate what had become a de facto rule, that you never poke at the GUI of a program from anything except the main thread.

Yet, despite trying any number of things which I remember knocked NT and 98 flat on its back, including poking around in treeview and memos while editing them, I couldn't knock Windows XP on its back with any of those tricks. I used to be able to get deadlocks/hangs with nearly any operation which changed the size of controls at least.

It still bowled over on creating or destroying controls from a different thread, but that I can forgive (controls are owned by the threads that create them).

So, as a slightly surprised heavy multi-threading user, my hats (slightly grudgingly) off...