[jjoonathan]

Yeah, the BOM has gotten me a few times.

My most spectacular fail was a program that read UTF-8 or Latin-1 and wrote UTF-16, preserving but not displaying null characters. I believe this was default behavior HyperStudio. Every round-trip would double the size of the file by inserting null bytes every other character. Soon there were giant stretches of null characters between each display character, but the displayed text never appeared to change even though the disk requirements doubled with each launch. That's how I learned about UTF-16!

Speaking of Win32/COM... is there a "tcpdump for COM"? I've got a legacy app that uses COM for IPC and I've been instrumenting each call for lack of one.

[carey]

If there is anything like tcpdump for COM, it would be part of Event Tracing for Windows, but you’d probably prefer to use it via Microsoft Message Analyzer.

[jchw]

A tcpdump for COM would be incredible... but I'm in the same boat of having just instrumented each call individually :(

I would guess though, that there is probably some pretty helpful code for this in the apitrace program that could probably be lifted out and reused, since DirectX APIs tend to involve a lot of COM. I haven't tried, though.