A little over a year ago, I emailed Steve Ballmer at Microsoft directly about an idea to make a digital, online user group community. I wanted to be able to let user groups from across the country make their monthly presentations available via the web. Rather than being limited to what is available in local communities across the country, I thought it would be very beneficial to be able to watch any presentation at any user group on any given month: Community-created web-casts if you will. I was suprised to hear a response from Mr Ballmer direclty. I still have the email in my inbox because it reminds me just how much Microsoft DOES care — even the biggest guys in the company will handle customer-related issues. Mr Ballmer thought it was a great idea and gave me some contacts to discuss with INETA as well as several other groups. To be honest, I got way too involved with other things and sadly never followed up. Apparently, the idea wasn’t lost on the folks at INETA or MS though. Brad Abrams has just reported that this dream is close to a reality in a new offering called “Live From Redmond.”. Although it is not quite the community I was envisioning, it does at least make many user-group meetings available via live meeting. It’s a very exciting concept and I hope you’ll take advantage of it.
Debugging Resources
It is my opinion that the difference between good developers and outstanding ones are the way that they debug applications. As such, I wanted to point you to some great debugging resources to get you well on your way to standing with the outstanding developers.
First off, there is the issue of understanding Windows to begin with that get a lot of people in trouble. Many issues can be traced down to something that is “working as designed”. As such, I highly recommend the Microsoft Windows Internals book from MS Press. This book will give you a great understanding of how Windows works. Next, I would brush up on .NET debugging skills. To do so, I recommend a .NET 2003 book, but most of the debugging skills still apply to 2005, so don’t be dismayed by the title: Debugging Applications for Microsoft .NET and Windows. Once again, John Robbins from Wintellect writes one awesome book.
Well, books are great, but what about free resources? I have some of those too!
First, you can check out the windows debugging website at:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx
Then there are a new series of webcasts that have just been released in the past week or so dealing with the very issue of debugging:
TechNet Webcast: Microsoft.com Operations Introduces Real World Debugging: Debugging CLR Internals
OK. So maybe I did not have a TON of debugging resources, but this is a great start for anyone who wants to make himself or herself into an outstanding SDE or SDET. So go work yourself into a “debugging guru”. By the time you are done, hopefully John Robbins’ new book on debugging will be out.
