Microsoft Releases Internal Tools

After nearly two decades of rigorously enforced secrecy, Microsoft has released a large collection of proprietary development tools (which had been used to skyrocket the company to the undisputed top of the software food chain) to outside developers. In an effort to quell lagging support in the international judicial arena, and to help combat the popular open-source movement, programmers will now have access to the same function libraries, source codes, and other design tools previously known only to the software giant's inner core of developers.

Participants of this year's Comdex convention will be given a sneek peek at the full package that will become available to the public at large later in the month. Literature which accompanied the announcement did not give all of the details, but described some of the highlights of what will be contained in the first release. These items include:

1) RamHole (rm) - This is a suite of tools that can be implemented in a variety of different ways, however the primary objective is to locate what is known as a "hole" in an application's memory management system, and then begin dumping tens of thousands of megabytes of random data into it.

2) AlphaThread (tm) - An SDK which can be used by any application (or web page) to obtain 100% control of the user's PC, helping to prevent any other thread from executing until the machine is rebooted or several hours pass.

3) WinMystery (tm) - More of a concept, rather than an SDK, but with plenty of examples! Display a white window somewhere on the screen, with no contents, and no way to close it. When the mouse hovers over this "mystery window" the cursor becomes an hourglass or better yet, a cursor image that no user has ever seen before (like a plus sign with one of those "no" circles around it an an arrow or whatever). CPU usage can range all the way up to 100% however the examples do not show how to get the window to show up in any kind of task list.

4) "no" (tm)(R) - Allows developers to include Microsoft's famous "no"(tm)(R) feature in which the user can click on any control (usually just a few at random but sometimes it can be all controls within the application) and the computer simply does nothing. "no"(tm)(R) also incorporates "again"(tm)(R) in which the control does nothing the first time, but will function as expected if clicked again within the space of a minute or so.

5) MouseRace(tm) - You can create a message saying "Click here" such as when an error occurs of the cause of the error can be revealed by clicking on a brief and uninformative error message (i.e. "an error occurred"). Windows automatically detects when the user's mouse begins to move and "It's On!", that is, being the race to get to the message before the message vanishes. Users LOVE this.

6) EverUpdate(tm) - Allows applications to want to be upgraded ever time they are lauched, regardless of how many times the user attempts the upgrade (this technology has already been licensed to Apple(R) and Adobe(R))

Other items were also listed but lacked precise explainations. These included Control-lock, Alt-lock, SingleRandomShiftedCharacter, ExitNever, ExitToRAM, SuperTree, IndexAway, TheCurrentDriveIsNoLongerValid, SystemError53HasOccurred, TheErrorNumberIsTheErrorMessage, PressF1ForNoKeyboard, ErrorOther, and UnknownDeviceFinder.

When asked if releasing this many internal secret weapons to their competors would ultimately wind up hurting their sales, an anonymous spokesman for Microsoft simply responded, "Have you seen Windows Vista?"