Is this thing still on? Is anyone still subscribed after all these years?
After taking a two-years-and-a-bit hiatus from the cutting edge of technology, I'm now about to return full time. But before we're back to the regular program, let me answer the question inevitable question: what was up with you??
What happend was that I've had the pleasure to find a few really amazing clients and decided to work with them on some of their medium/longer-term projects (longer term meaning substantially more than the usual three-day-visit to a client to help them with a particular issue or question they might have). I really like to do this every couple of years to get a more "real" feeling about the day-to-day pain points in software development projects. So instead of doing only the regular short-term consulting (which of course still was going on as well), I went back to the trenches and cranked out some real, production code in some real, production projects for a change. It was fun. Really!
On the research side, I've concentrated not so much on tomorrow's technologies, but more on currently shipping stuff which could be used in these projects. I've also worked a *lot* with WinDbg (and its possibilities constantly amaze me ... I still think that every serious development team should have at least one WinDbg expert). With this tool, it's just *so* much easier to find problems in production code which happen only on production machines far away from Visual Studio or any other debugger.
During the second half of 2008 I started to feel the urge to return back to the cutting edge (and the other thinktecture guys were already making some serious fun of me and my dedication to already-shipping ASP.NET stuff). But I didn't find the compelling topics to look into. WPF would be nice, but frankly, I'm more of a server-side person. WF? Yes, sure. Doing this on a regular basis. WCF? Just a tool for me, no religious feelings about it.
But then along came October. And as it was the case for a lot of developers, last year's PDC gave me the opportunity to see some really cool upcoming stuff. (Publicly and even more so in private meetings). I've then started to scale back the longer-term committments to return to researching the cutting edge. In 2009, I'll return to the conference track with these topics, plan to write more blog posts (well ... it would be hard to write less than what I did, anyway) and I'm actually also currently discussing an idea for a new book. I think there's some fun time ahead.
Yes this thing is still on and we are (at least I am) waiting on the other side of the line :) I am looking forward to your blog posts, WinDbg tips and tricks (especially for the managed developer) would be great!
Posted by: Huseyin Tufekcilerli | 03/06/2009 at 11:51 AM
Huseyin: Thanks for the kind words. Actually, I think that a lot of great stuff has already been written about WinDbg (just thinking about Tess' blog and John Robbins' book). I'll tend to focus on some of the more future stuff ... ;-)
Posted by: Ingo Rammer | 03/06/2009 at 11:57 AM
Awesome seeing you back out here my friend! :) Look forward to the new stuff you've been working on!
Posted by: Tomas Restrepo | 03/06/2009 at 02:32 PM
It's good to see you back (see above link)!!
Posted by: Sam Gentile | 03/07/2009 at 02:13 AM
Very happy to see you back. Looking forward to the cutting edge.
Posted by: william_w | 06/09/2009 at 01:08 AM