[MS] What's a PFN? - devamazonaws.blogspot.com

What's a PFN?

MSIX introduced Package identity in Windows 8. While the familiar package identity "5-tuple" was functional, it wasn't especially convenient to pass through APIs or embed in resources such as files, registry keys, URLs, or XML documents.

To address this, Windows defined an opaque string representation known as a Package Moniker. Windows called a related identifier derived from a package's Name and Publisher the Package Family Moniker. These were commonly abbreviated as PM and PFM.

As development progressed, Windows quite sensibly required new APIs to pass through API Design Review. The review team (then and now) consists of very senior developers from across Windows, pooling their collective experience to help ensure APIs are polished before they're released into the wild.

Eventually, the Package API came before the review team.

The review team spent quite a bit of time questioning the terms Package Moniker and Package Family Moniker, ultimately leading to one reviewer's memorable suggestion:

Moniker is too geeky. How about Name?

"Too geeky."

In that room.

The irony wasn't lost on any of us.

Someone suggested PackageName and PackageFamilyName. Unfortunately, PackageName conflicted with the existing Name field in a package identity. Someone then proposed PackageFullName, and the room happily agreed.

In hindsight, we probably should have noticed the problem immediately.

It wasn't until later that we realized we'd created two terms with the same acronym: PFN.

Since different features, subsystems, and teams often deal with one or the other, discussions about "PFN" became increasingly common. Inevitably, someone would interpret "PFN" to mean the other thing, and confusion would promptly ensue.

This happened often enough that I began interrupting meetings to ask:

I'm sorry. What's a PFN?

I've done this so many times that I've occasionally joked it should be tattooed across my forehead.

Don't abbreviate.


Post Updated on August 18, 2026 at 05:00PM
Thanks for reading
from devamazonaws.blogspot.com

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

[MS] Boosting Azure DevOps Security with GHAS Code Scanning - devamazonaws.blogspot.com

Image
Debjyoti Ganguly shares insights on the security benefits and configuration of GHAS Code Scanning with Azure DevOps. Boosting Azure DevOps Security with GHAS Code Scanning Code scanning, a pipeline-based tool available in GitHub Advanced Security, is designed to detect code vulnerabilities and bugs within the source code of ADO (Azure DevOps) repositories. Utilizing CodeQL as a static analysis tool, it performs query analysis and variant analysis. When vulnerabilities are found, it generates security alerts. CodeQL CodeQL is a powerful static analysis tool used for showing vulnerabilities and bugs in source code. It enables developers to write custom queries that analyze codebases, searching for specific patterns and potential security issues. By converting code into a database format, CodeQL allows for sophisticated, database-like queries to detect flaws. CodeQL in Action 1. Preparing the Code Create a CodeQL Database : Extract and structure the code into a database for analy...
Read more

[MS] Pulling a single item from a C++ parameter pack by its index, remarks - devamazonaws.blogspot.com

In my earlier discussion of pulling a single item from a C++ parameter pack by its index , I noted that with the Pack Indexing proposal, you would be able to write this to pull an item from a parameter pack while preserving its reference category. template<int index, typename...Args> void example(Args&&... args) { auto&& arg = (Args...[index]&&)args...[index]; using Arg = Args...[index]&&; } Why did I need to apply the (Args...[index]&&) cast ? Why can't I just write this: auto&& arg = args...[index]; or possibly decltype(auto) arg = args...[index]; Well, when you write the name of a variable, the result is an lvalue reference, even if the variable is an rvalue reference . Watch: struct S { S(S&); // construct from lvalue S(S&&); // construct from rvalue }; void whathappens(S&& s) { S t = s; // which will it use? } Try it out in your favorite compiler. This code construc...
Read more

[MS] The case of the crash when destructing a std::map - devamazonaws.blogspot.com

A customer reported that they were getting crashes while destructing a std::map . Here's the point of the crash: eax=245bd25c ebx=00004d33 ecx=31feece4 edx=00c40000 esi=00000000 edi=31feece4 eip=563397db esp=245bd250 ebp=245bd268 iopl=0 nv up ei ng nz na pe nc cs=0023 ss=002b ds=002b es=002b fs=0053 gs=002b efl=00010286 contoso!std::_Tree<⟦...⟧>::~_Tree+0x2b: 563397db cmp byte ptr [esi+0Dh],0 ds:002b:0000000d=?? 0:054> k9 ChildEBP RetAddr (Inline) -------- contoso!std::_Tree_val<⟦...⟧>::_Erase_tree [xtree @ 1073] (Inline) -------- contoso!std::_Tree_val<⟦...⟧>::_Erase_head+0x5 [xtree @ 1073] 245bd268 56338313 contoso!std::_Tree<⟦...⟧>::~_Tree+0x2b [xtree @ 1073] 245bd290 56362695 contoso!Contoso::IdCollection::~IdCollection+0x163 245bd2b4 564c8510 contoso!Contoso::LogEntry::~LogEntry+0xd5 245bd2e0 5691a999 contoso!Contoso::LogEntries::Cleanup+0x90 (Inline) -------- con...
Read more