Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Thomas Scott Coon

Benjamin E Canning

Steven Miles Greenberg

Qixing Zheng

Christopher M White

Martijn Eldert Van Tilburg

Mark Yalovsky

Michael Philip Arcuri

Alex G Snitkovskiy

David Charles LeBlanc

Jeffrey J Johnson

William Robert Messmer

Michael Ronn Marcelais

Theodore Ludovicus Michel

Gabriel S DeBacker

Eric A LeVine

Christopher E Swan

Christopher Cameron White

Aaron Everett Erlandson

Sheng Zhou

John Bronn Socha-Leialoha

Jason Morris Yore

Jeffery D Mitchell

Alexis Warren Manning

Daniel Samuel Charlton

In some examples, a gesture configuration component provides for different ways to interpret gestures made by a user to specify various parameters of control settings to modify system or application settings. For instance, a user may change display settings for one or more display devices, such as resolution, orientation, and display arrangements. Further, in some cases, the gesture configuration component may perform configuration changes while providing a live preview of the changes being made.

Gesture manipulations for configuring system settings

Charging dock

A display environment for a plurality of display devices is described. In one or more implementations, a display environment of an operating system of a computing device is configured to display a plurality of shells that support user interaction with the operating system by launching a first shell for display on a first display device of the computing device and launching a second shell for display on a second display device of the computing device such that the first and second shells are displayable simultaneously by the computing device.

Display environment for a plurality of display devices

Visualization for active execution tracing pertains to one or more tools used to capture and analyze events leading to a point-of-failure during execution of a function or at least a portion of an application, program, process, or other assemblage of programmable and executable code.

Active execution tracing

Techniques are provided for performing memory diagnostics. A portion of physical memory is locked using functionality included in an operating system. At least one memory diagnostic test is executed on the portion producing a result. It is determined, in accordance with the result, whether a memory problem exists for the portion of physical memory.

Techniques for performing memory diagnostics

Applications are protected from being exposed to exploits and instabilities due to memory operations involving zero byte allocations. Memory operations involving a zero byte allocation are handled by a zero byte memory manager. When an application requests a zero byte allocation, a pointer to a protected part of memory is returned such that when the application attempts to read and/or write to the location the program flow is interrupted.

Protecting memory operations involving zero byte allocations

A method and apparatus are provided for providing custom product support for a computer program based on levels of execution instability. The execution of a software program is monitored over a period of time to determine the execution stability of the program. Based upon the monitoring and upon one or more threshold levels of instability, the execution stability of the program is categorized. Based upon the categorization, custom program support may be provided for a user of the computer system executing the program. For instance, based on the categorization free or reduced fee product support may be provided.

Method, system, and apparatus for providing custom product support for a software program based upon states of program execution instability

An application is associated with a main thread that is running on an operating system. A secondary thread monitors the main thread to determine whether the application is in a hang state. A ghost window that matches the hung application window is displayed on a user interface and the hung application is hidden from view. An application crash is attempted on the main thread when the user closes the ghost window. If the crash is successful, any unsaved data associated with the hung application is recovered. Error information associated with the cause of the application hang may also be collected.

Method and system for recovering data from a hung application

A method, system, and apparatus are provided for identifying unresponsive portions of a computer program. According to the method, program code that can potentially result in unresponsive behavior is wrapped in timers. A timer is started on a background thread at the beginning of the execution of a section of program code. The timer is set to expire after a specified threshold period of time has expired. A determination is made as to whether the timer expires during the execution of the section of program code. If the timer expires during the execution of the section of program code, execution is interrupted and the section of program code is identified as unresponsive and system state information is stored for use in diagnosing the computer program and remedying the unresponsive behavior. The actual system state information stored may be defined by a remote control file and may be stored at or around the time the timer expires.

Method, system, and apparatus for identifying unresponsive portions of a computer program

An event monitoring and logging system, including apparatuses and methods, for instrumenting an on-line application program, or service, for generating and communicating events upon the occurrence of certain conditions during the execution thereof, for monitoring generated events in real and near-real time in accordance with configurable rules, for generating and communicating selected alerts to appropriate personnel upon the exceeding of configurable thresholds, for logging generated events and related information in data files and databases for subsequent analysis, and for producing reports related to such instrumentation and generated events.

On-line service/application monitoring and reporting system

Drop down menus provided by a computer program are provided in two states, a short menu state and a long menu state. When a user opens a desired menu, the menu opened will initially take the form of a short menu of executable commands which are a subset of the total number of executable commands available under the selected menu. The short menu may be dynamically expanded into a long menu which will contain the complete set of executable commands available under the selected menu. The short menu may be adapted to the personal needs of the user when the user selects commands from the long menu which are not contained in the short menu. Usage information is stored and updated on the usage of each menu command added to a short menu. Menu commands are removed from the adapted short menus based on non-use of those menu commands by the user. Information stored, maintained, and updated on the usage of the menu commands added to the short menus is stored in a compact and efficient data structure which facilitates efficient computer memory use.

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Kirkland, WA, United States of America

Thomas Scott Coon