• Tracing Events Raised by Any C# Object—in which I describe a technique for tracing the events of any C# object using a very simple helper class, using .NET Reflection to get the event handlers of an arbitrary object.
• Password Field Unhider (and some C++ utility classes)—first I present a small utility that lives in the Windows notification area and stands ready at any time to unhide (that is, unmask) any password field on the screen, so you can see what you’re typing. And second, I describe some very simple yet useful C++ utility classes: a general message pump, an IPC mechanism using WM_COPYDATA, and a work item dispatcher.

I intend to post more articles at CodeProject, the kind of useful tips, tutorial, explanation things, with source code, that are longer than the typical blog post.

• To enter equation mode: Insert|Equation or Alt+= shortcut. Note that the Insert ribbon doesn’t have the Equation item when in Blog mode. Why not? (Question: How do I get it to appear in Blog mode?)
• Dataninja: Undocumented Word 2007 Equation Shortcuts—John Gardner created this very nice reference card with some useful equation formatted tips.
• Word Team Blog: Equations in 2007—an introductory post, with links to two screenshot-videos on how to use linear method. Unfortunately – she doesn’t explain, while she is typing, how to enter equation mode or how use the keyboard to move the cursor from one insertion field to the next. (This is currently the only post on the Word Team blog with the tag “equations”.)
• Word 2007 Help: Math AutoCorrect Symbols—I cut&pasted this from the Word 2007 Help—it is more easily used in this format.
• TechRepublic: Microsoft Office Word 2007 Inside and Out sample chapter on Building Blocks—TechRepublic offers this sample chapter of Microsoft Office Word 2007 Inside and Out—the chapter is all about Building Blocks, which is what the equations gallery is made of. It explains a bit about Math Autocorrect mode, linear equation entry, and how to add your own equations to the gallery. This chapter is pretty good—the book might be worth getting.
• Word Team Blog: Equation Numbering—a post on how to number the equations in your document. There is a video here too. (This is currently the only post on the Word Team blog with the tag “equations video”.)
• Murray Sargent: Math in Office: Using Math Italic and Bold in Word 2007—How using the ribbon’s italic and bold formatting buttons provides the proper math italic and bold characters for variables.
• UTN 28: Unicode Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics—this document, an Unicode consortium Technical Note written by the Microsoft developer who implemented the feature, is a complete description of the linear entry method.
• Murray Sargent: Math Selection—a brief note on how selection works inside an equation, and the related post Murray Sargent: Using Left/Right Arrow Keys in Mathematical Text on how the insertion points works inside an equation.
• Murray Sargent: Breaking Equations Into Multiple Lines—A nice description of how to break equations onto multiple lines, and also how to align multiple equations on a specific character.
• David Carlisle: XHTML and MathML from Office 2007—David Carlisle provides instructions and an XSL stylesheet so you can take the HTML output of Word 2007 and run it through his process to get an XHTML document that has the math equations in MathML format (normally Word 2007 saves equations in “ECMA Math” format, OMML—apparently a Microsoft invention). Note that Word allows you to cut/paste MathML to/from the Clipboard (so you get get equations into or out of Mathematica, for example).
• Murray Sargent: User Spaces in Math Zones—On typing spaces into equations: Just don’t do it!

Interesting, but not as practical:

• Murray Sargent: When Formula Autobuildup Occurs—Technical description of parsing for formula autobuildup
• Murray Sargent: High-Quality Editing and Display of Mathematical Text in Office 2007—This post describes some of the technical background to the mathematical typesetting in Office 2007. It also has a description of the neat Alt-x hex-to-Unicode conversion feature (if you like memorizing the Unicode code points of various mathematical symbols). It also points to this presentation: Math Editing and Display in Office 2007 (Murray Sargent) which summarizes the points in the post.

General places to look for information:

• Murray Sargent: Math in Office Blog—Murray Sargent is the SDE who implemented math/equation mode in Office
• The Microsoft Office Word Team’s Blog—Blog of the Microsoft Word team

But before I get started, here is a useful paper that characterizes race conditions formally: What Are Race Conditions? Some Issues and Formalizations (Robert H. B. Netzer, Barton P. Miller) [ACM Letters on Programming Languages and Systems v1n1, March 1992).

Netzer (who wrote his PhD thesis on this subject) classifies data races into two categories: general races, which pertain to programs which are meant to be deterministic, and data races, which pertain to programs which are non-deterministic. Then he also presents an orthogonal classification of races: feasible races which “capture the intuitive notions desired for debugging” but which are hard to compute completely and accurately, and apparent races which “capture less accurate notions” which can be detected in practice, but which are sufficiently less accurate that they tend to swamp the user with false positives.

So: general races cause non-deterministic execution in programs intended to be deterministic, and data races cause non-atomic execution of critical sections in non-deterministic programs. Thus both kind of races can cause failures in programs.

In fact, in my most recent job, I dealt with both kinds of races in the application program we were building.

In fact, both general races and data races are important concepts. Your typical Windows application program is non-deterministic – execution depends on the precise timing and ordering of input events (keystroke, mouse movement, and system messages) – but also contains large sections that are intended to operated deterministically (e.g., if in Photoshop you load a certain image file, and execute a specific filter with specific parameters on it, and then you save the resulting image in another file, then the result should be the same each time you do it even if the timing of your mouse movements differs from run to run.)

(Note that the “critical sections” that are violated by data races need not be the operating system-provided primitive, like CRITICAL_SECTION objects in Windows. It just means any bit of code that implements—or is supposed to implement—mutual exclusion.)

(By the way, I found this article somewhat difficult to understand: the differences between the feasibledata races and apparent races, which are the key to Netzer’s classification, were hard to grasp. Also it wasn’t really clear what he meant by feasible execution. Finally, the writing was repetitive in places.)