An Introduction

Hello World.

My name is Steve Carroll, and I'm a developer on the Visual Studio Team System team.  Specifically, I work on the profiler and code coverage tools.  Even MORE specifically, I work on the analysis phase of the profiler (with Simon Meachem) and the analysis phase of code coverage.  Basically, I take the big hunks of data that we collect and turn them into nice manageable statistics complete with correct symbol information. 

I haven't decided 100% how I am going to manage this personal blog.  Most of the articles I intend to write about profiling analysis will end up on the profiler team blog so we can keep all the information in one place.  So I'm thinking this space will be used for general musings, stuff about code coverage, and of course, giving people advice on their love life.

A little background: I started at MSFT in late September 2003, so I'm still a relative newbie.  I came here straight after graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  (Or as my wife would say, “after FINALLY graduating“).  My PhD dissertation was on the topic of improving compiler extensibility using incremental analysis, which makes me a compiler guy by training although my work here at VisualStudio so far is all dev tools, all the time.  Change is good!  I'm just really happy to be working as a Dev on a team that is going to ship great software.  Sitting around and thinking about problems in the academic vein is definately fun, but putting software in people's hands has its own unique rewards.  My current working theory is that working in performance tools will help me key in on where the problems of real users are so when I eventually return to the research fold, I'll be wiser, more focused and practical.  I'll get back to you on how that works out in a few years . ;-)