Columbus Startup Weekend

I signed up for Columbus Startup Weekend. It
seems like a good chance to connect with the Columbus Ohio startup scene. I have worked at Netscape, AvantGo, and now KACE, so I have experiences with startups in Silicon Valley. I have not had made a lot of connections in Columbus related to technology companies. I am looking forward to this weekend in July to connect with all different types of people interested in started new companies from all of the different angles - from legal, to PR, to design, to development and everything else it takes to start and launch a company. If you are interested, please sign up. If you have already signed up, please introduce yourself.

Launching Windows Processes

The myriad of ways to launch processes on Microsoft Windows is staggering. Getting your application right is very difficult. One challenge I recently came across was a problem launching certain Microsoft command line tools. I had the same problem from both .NET (using C#) and from using the native CreateProcess Win32 API. If you are having problems with System.Diagnostics.Process or CreateProcess while trying to capture standard out and/or standard error, it very likely could be the same issue. Some of the applications that were found to have the problem were: chkntfs.exe, chkdsk.exe, xcopy.exe. As it turns out, for one reason or another for these particular applications, if you are capturing stdout or stderr, you must also give a handle for capturing stdin. Once you do that it will start working correctly.

I searched for awhile on Google and found several people who had the same problem, but never could find a satisfactory answer. Finally came up with this, so hopefully documenting it here will help others in the future.