Where on earth did Larry go?

No, nothing bad happened to me, I just got a bit caught up in work stuff.

 

I spent the last three weeks volunteering to help another team at Microsoft finish off the final set of work items on a new tool they're building - one of the developers on the project quit for family reasons and they had a major milestone coming up last week and nobody to complete it.  Since the team doing the work knew that the tool would help in an area in which I was passionate, they asked and my manager was gracious enough to let me help them out.

Actually, it was a bit funny - I've never used Visual Studio as a development environment for anything real before, I hadn't realized how amazing it is as a development environment (the ability to set breakpoints inside an XSL transform seems like magic).  It's also a much more intense development experience than I'm used to.  For most of the past 30 years, my normal development cycle has been (in college I didn't have the "copy it to my test machine" step, but otherwise it's essentially been unchanged):

    1. "write some code",
    2. "compile it",
    3. "copy it to my test machine",
    4. "test the changes",
    5. got to #1.

Using Visual Studio changes the tempo of the cycle dramatically.  The JIT compiling, edit-and-continue support and the speed of the compiler combine to make a much more rapid turn-around time on changes than I'm used to.  This shows up in subtle ways - normally I have no trouble keeping up with my incoming email flow - I switch to Outlook while I'm in step #2 and #3 to read my email.  But while I was working in VS, I didn't have time - there were no significant slow times in the process - the edit/compile/test cycle was sufficiently quick that I didn't have the ability to keep up with my email.

Go figure.

 

Anyway, I'm back :)  I'm in a class all day today, so nothing more interesting, but I AM planning on finishing up the series on volume.  Oh, and I've got a new "API that should be banned" to write about :)