
Raymond Chen patches MS Money executable to fix bug - joe_bleau
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/11/13/10367904.aspx
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Skywing
Reading this makes me miss the early days of learning to program. I would
reverse engineer games that I enjoyed and write hacks for them. I spent hours
and hours every night staring at ASM and network data. Man, how I'd love to
somehow be able to get paid to reverse engineer games all days.

Edited to include funny sample. It was literally a hack to make the chat
client better. How nerdy was/am I? Hah: [https://github.com/ryancole/broodwar-
chat-enhancements/blob/...](https://github.com/ryancole/broodwar-chat-
enhancements/blob/master/asm.cpp)

~~~
d0ne
Interested in joining a fast growing venture + industry titan(s) backed
Information Security startup that is changing cyber security and information
privacy the world over?

Although there may not be games to reverse engineer (where I got my start 14
years ago as well) there are plenty of other equally fun applications of this
skill set. :)

I'm the founder and currently on a plane but if you email adam (a t)
socialfortress com we will get back promptly.

~~~
cookingrobot
FYI - it looks like some of your wufoo scripts on the Enterprise signup page
are loading insecurely. Wufoo has https endpoints as well, so it should be a
quick fix.

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famousactress
Anyone unfamiliar with Mr. Chen might enjoy Joel's article. The first time I
read it the bits from/about Chen definitely left a lasting impression:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html>

~~~
silverlight
From the same article, although not related to this subject, I found this gem:

"Here are a few examples of things you can't really do well in a web
application:

1\. Create a fast drawing program

2\. Build a real-time spell checker with wavy red underlines

3\. Warn users that they are going to lose their work if they hit the close
box of the browser

4\. Update a small part of the display based on a change that the user makes
without a full roundtrip to the server

5\. Create a fast keyboard-driven interface that doesn't require the mouse

6\. Let people continue working when they are not connected to the Internet"

It makes me smile that all of these are now incredibly trivial to implement in
web apps :-)

~~~
shin_lao
How do you do #4 and #6?

~~~
smackfu
For #4, I assume he means something like "click-to-expand" which now can be
done entirely client-side in Javascript.

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citizenlow
Genuinely hard to express how seeing this made me feel -- particularly on a
day of coincidental turmoil for Windows & MS. (I was a developer & dev lead on
MS Money long ago, and clearly remember dragging him over for extended
nighttime in-person kd stack-unwinding sessions.) He was so generous to our
efforts to make that product a good one, and his electric, unstoppably
curious, just-get-it-right combination of deep skill, energy, & attention to
customers still totally inspires.

Be as much like him as possible. Necktie optional.

~~~
JunkDNA
I have to say, MS Money might be the only product from MS that I genuinely
_loved_. I was a big fan of MS for years, but in the mid-2000's the security
stuff on XP got to be too much. After leaving Windows for the Mac in 2005,
Money was the only product I actually missed (and still miss).

Your team did a seriously great job. I had never used Quicken before switching
to the Mac. When I did, I couldn't believe what a steaming pile of user
experience pain it was compared to Money. There were so many little details
that were right in Money and head-slappingly wrong in Quicken. So often my
experience with a lot of other MS products has been that if you wander the
little dark corners, edge cases are lurking to bite you. I just never got that
feeling when using Money.

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gggggggg
MS Money is a great product for simple home use. THough it seems with some new
features the program went a little cock-eyed and some of the nice simple tasks
became harder, but it was still a great tool (i have no money these days, so
no longer have a need to use it)..

For all interested, here is the link to download the latest version for free.
[http://www.microsoft.com/en-
au/download/details.aspx?id=2073...](http://www.microsoft.com/en-
au/download/details.aspx?id=20738)

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j45
This pretty much makes me want to dust off my Treo 650 and go back to the Palm
OS, because no smartphone since has been as productivity enabling.

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donebizkit
this should be forwarded to all the douches that call themselves hackers ...
this is what hacking is. P.S. I am nowhere near this level but again I don't
call myself a hacker just a coder.

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randomaccount5
I still use MSMoney. For my relatively simple home finances, its absolutely
perfect.

~~~
Karunamon
Likewise. It does the job, has a nice interface, and still works with direct
connect to my bank.

Though the Quicken that just came out with mobile app support is tempting the
hell out of me...

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rwmj
Can anyone who works at MSFT explain why Raymond Chen wouldn't have access to
the source of MS Money? Code doesn't compile on modern compilers? Written in
an obscure language? They've lost the code? Company is so siloed that no one
from another dept is allowed to see the code?

~~~
ryanmolden
In general not everyone has access to all code. Microsoft has over 90k
employees not counting contractors. To get access to various projects/depts
source depots you have to request access. Some access is auto-approved, for
instance I am auto approved for devdiv and windows source access. Others
require someone approving your access request. For instance, a few months back
I was seeing a really, really annoying bug in Lync, I wanted to troubleshoot
it since the repro was sporadic and I wanted to include an analysis in the bug
I filed. It was the I found even getting access to non-stripped Office pdbs
requires special permission, I applied for it and was denied :( Sometimes the
bureaucracy baffles me.

~~~
cube13
MS Money was end of life'd at the end of January
2011(<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2118008> ).

It's possible that MS has archived the source off of their development
repositories, since nobody should be doing anything with that code.

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raverbashing
For the extra challenge put the code in the data fed to the program, causing a
stack overflow and make it run the code that makes everything nice again!

