July 2004 - Posts

• NuMega – Where are they now?

  One of the best experiences of my programming career was during the golden years of NuMega. Roughly defined as when I started in 1993, up to the acquisition of NuMega by Compuware, roughly five years later. During those years, we put out some terrific Read More... Posted Friday, July 30, 2004 12:42 PM by Matt Pietrek | 5 Comments

• Writing a successful programming book

  Chris Sells expounds on What Makes A Book Successful . Be sure to read the comments for my thoughts on Chris's points. Read More... Posted Wednesday, July 28, 2004 1:22 PM by Matt Pietrek | 4 Comments

• Your suggestion(s) needed

  It's been awhile since I wrote for MSDN magazine. Now that I work for Microsoft, the whole financial situation changes. The short story is that I don't get paid for any articles or columns I might write for them. I'm not crying about this too much, as Read More... Posted Tuesday, July 27, 2004 3:19 PM by Matt Pietrek | 17 Comments

• Fun with Iterators and state machines

  I recently was given a piece of C# code with statements like: yield return value; and yield break; This was the beginning of my descent into the loopy world of C# 2.0 iterators. It took me awhile to wrap my head around them, and when I tried to explain Read More... Posted Monday, July 26, 2004 2:04 PM by Matt Pietrek | 24 Comments

• Vegas, Baby!

  Through some strange fluke, I'd never been to Las Vegas since this past weekend. The occasion: A bachelor/bachelorette party for my SO's brother and his future bride. As I expected, I was fascinated just by walking around all the various resort hotels Read More... Posted Tuesday, July 20, 2004 12:28 PM by Matt Pietrek | 6 Comments

• Set Next Statement is your friend

  Yesterday I identified a symbol loading issue with the current internal drop of the VS debugger. Within minutes, I had Steve Steiner from the debugger team here in my office, stepping through the code with me. It was a tricky situation because we were Read More... Posted Wednesday, July 14, 2004 11:59 AM by Matt Pietrek | 8 Comments

• Revenge of the laptop

  While I'm generally in favor of cheap technology for the masses, I've recently been hit by the curse of inexpensive laptops. No, I'm not having problems myself. Rather, laptops are now cheap enough that lots of my non-technical family & friends have Read More... Posted Sunday, July 11, 2004 10:55 PM by Matt Pietrek | 8 Comments

• Where's Dad?

  I was lucky enough to have many friends and family converge on my house this weekend. Somewhere along the line, somebody pulled out a video of my family at various group camping events during the 1980's. My sister and I were especially anxious to see Read More... Posted Sunday, July 11, 2004 10:37 PM by Matt Pietrek | 3 Comments

• Thoughts on writing an IL Disassembler

  I’m a big fan of writing your own version of tools, even if there’s already an existing tool. Why? Because writing your own tool is absolutely the best way to understand the concepts. You’ll run into all sorts of little gotchas and special Read More... Posted Friday, July 09, 2004 4:08 PM by Matt Pietrek | 9 Comments

• Real Rock still lives!

  It's sad, but lately a lot of the music I love is released overseas first. Thanks to the internet, I can easily bypass the stupid release schedules of the record labels. Most recently, the Datsuns put out a new album (Outta Sight/Outta Mind) in the UK. Read More... Posted Thursday, July 08, 2004 1:44 PM by Matt Pietrek | 13 Comments

• Hello, Blog!

  So... My life has finally settled down a bit, and I find myself working for The Man , here in Redmond WA. This first post is really just to introduce myself a bit, and tell you where I think this blog will be going. I've been in software development for Read More... Posted Thursday, July 08, 2004 1:13 PM by Matt Pietrek | 12 Comments