Reddit user sammiesdog discovered recently that Visual Studio 2015 C++ compiler was inserting calls to a Microsoft telemetry function into binaries. “I compiled a simple program with only main(). When looking at the compiled binary in IDA, I see a call fortelemetry_main_invoke_trigger and telemetry_main_return_trigger. I cannot find documentation for these calls, either on the web or in the options page,” he wrote. Only after the discovery did Steve Carroll, the dev manager for Visual C++ admit to the “feature” and posted a workaround to remove it.
A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the existence of this behavior to InfoQ, adding that the company wil be removing it in a future preview build. For those who wish to get rid of it, the blog writes:
Users who have a copy of VS2015 Update 2 and wish to turn off the telemetry functionality currently being compiled into their code should add notelemetry.obj to their linker command line.
There is a little trick to disable “Known IDE Packages”: you can stop Delphi from loading one by either making “Value data” of the registry blank, or prepending it with an underscore:
packages that might have been disabled, by checking any string entries where the data has been pre-pended with an underscore OR is blank
I’ve pre-pended underscores to some packages in the registry key [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Borland|Codegear|Embarcadero\BDS|Delphi\#.0\Known IDE Packages] and intend to keep the list below updated over time.
Note that you have to prepend the description with an underscore: it is not sufficient to add these to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Borland|Codegear|Embarcadero\BDS\#.0\Disabled Packages].
Empirically, the Disabled Packages seem to work only for packages starting with dcl in their filename.
A while ago I bumped into this interesting bit: LLLPG (Loyc LL(k) Parser Generator) is a new recursive-decent parser generator for C#, with a feature set better than ANTLR version 2.
Recently I bumped into a thing that I’d long forgotten: the Delphi compiler treats searching for include files (any files used with the {$I} or {$include} directive differently:
The compiler first searches the directory where the file that is including resides and then uses the project and IDE search paths.
The IDE only uses the project and IDE search paths.
This means that when you press Ctrl-Enter on the filename to be included you might edit a different file than the compiler will include.
So when a product has multiple include files with the same name in different sub-directories, then you must modify them all.
I’m not sure this is a bug or feature, so Embarcadero is free to put this in either their QA system or documentation system.
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The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
