Top tip from the original Task Manager taskmaster: Don't put your phone number on that debug message box

Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has continued his series of Windows insights with a rummage around historical Task Manager source code. Plummer talked about his role in the creation of Task Manager earlier this year and has posted a series of videos on the subject on his YouTube channel over recent days, culminating in …

[Wolfclaw]

Shame Microsoft now employ brain dead monkeys to do most of their coding and would scream if they didn't have megabytes of memory to waste.

[A Non e-mouse]

I suspect TaskManager is smaller & lighter as it has to work so close to the kernel. I bet most applications use much higher level abstractions which add all the bloat.

[Anonymous Coward]

"...work so close to the kernel..."

Surely it just queries the kernel via a well known API, so in theory anyone could write a task manager.

[Korev]

The pre-borg Sysinternals wrote the excellent Process Explorer, does any one know what that uses?

A virtual pint for the Sysinternals Tools developers -->

[Ellipsis]

Many of the Sysinternals tools install their own device driver to get direct access to kernel data that aren’t exposed through user-mode APIs. Task Manager is purely user-mode.

[Unicornpiss]

Process Explorer

Agreed. While Task Manager wasn't bad, Process Explorer is what should have shipped with all versions of Windows. I wish there was a port of this useful, versatile, Swiss Army knife of an application for the Linux platform. Finding Process Explorer after using Task Manager for years was like the scene in the Wizard of Oz where everything turns Technicolor.

[Anonymous Coward]

brain dead monkeys

Teams.

[Potemkine!]

Wow! So there was a time when people were able to manage memory by themselves, without having to rely on a garbage collector? That's amazing!

// Yes, I could use virtual destructors, but I could also poke

// myself in the eye with a sharp stick. Either way, you wouldn't

// be able to see what's going on

I totally agree with that.

[Ellipsis]

Of course, if Dave did poke himself in the eye with a sharp stick, he wouldn’t be able to see what’s going on, either…

I do remember once running Spy++ at the same time as Task Manager, and being mildly surprised that ‘DavesFrameClass’ had made it into production code…

[MarkET]

Source code

The early versions of the Windows 3.1 DDK included an entry point named "OnlyBozosGetHere" along with "whatTF".

[Anonymous Coward]

Process Monitor..

..which replaced filemon and appmon are Task Manager on steroids

[Captain Scarlet]

Still prefer original task manager

As old machines easily consume 10% cpu resources just to display the new version

[druck]

Dave's gone

"If you corrupt its registry data, it can effectively uninstall and reinstall itself silently behind the scenes to repair itself. If system resources aren't available, it does without. Most applications are content to, at most, validate that their assumptions are true. Task Manager adjusts and adapts to the reality of the situation, which is a step beyond."

Dave was obviously long gone by the time of Windows 8.1, where it removes it's registry entries while running, so if shutdown unexpectedly (which is expected often), it starts backup having lost all the user settings.

[Blackjack]

Re: Dave's gone

To be fair, changing user settings is a way to crash Windows, or at least has been in any version of Windows I have ever used.

Default has the advantage that you know is most likely to work.

[Ian Johnston]

Years ago I was asked to have a look at program running on an ancient computer in a university's psychology department, running an equally ancient version of Unix. So ancient, in fact, that when I typed "man <something other>" it replied "If you need help with this, go and see Brian Kernighan in Room 3708".

[Ozan]

THat's computer museam acient level.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Boss, I need you to book me this plane ticket."

[Boris the Cockroach]

Naming his functions

Dave

Yupp... still do stupid things like that here...

boristoolreplace, boristoolmeasue borisisatool...

[Ken Hagan]

Re: Naming his functions

Why are you writing tools for an ISA bus in this century?

[Howard Sway]

Choices, choices....

Tonight I shall watch Dave on Task Manager, followed by Taskmaster on Dave (11.20 pm)

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: Choices, choices....

Taskmaster?

When is Beastmaster on?

[Anonymous Coward]

3970X

A Ryzen man. He gets my respect!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're exaggerating

> let's face it; looking at one's own code from decades past can be traumatic in the extreme

My code hasn't got *that* much worse over the years.

[Robert Carnegie]

Re: You're exaggerating

My Transact-SQL code is baffling, to me, in twelve months. That's when I start adding in comments. ;-)

Next year: more comments...