Hello World

Hello world!

I guess this title shows that historically I'm a C/C++ developer. But where does my blog subtitle come from?

Flashback to the PDC 2001. On the preconference day, Don Box is giving a superb introduction to .NET for COM developers. He illustrates his talk with references to 'The Matrix'. As a C++/COM developer, what do you do with .NET? Do you take the blue or the red pill? Take the blue pill and you will forget what you've seen of the .NET world, living in blissfull ignorance in the unmanaged world for the rest of your life. Take the red pill and your view of the world will change forever.

4 years later, I realize that I've taken the two pills. On one hand, I've fully embraced the .NET world. These days, I'm writing very little unmanaged code, most of my software development happens with .NET languages. On the other hand, I'm still very much involved with the unmanaged world. Legacy code (which may be a large portion of the existing codebase) is unmanaged or mixed managed/unmanaged. Performance tuning requires an understanding of a software system beyond the .NET virtual machine, reaching into the unmanaged world and the world of hardware.

My blog will cover whatever I find interesting. Most likely it will be .NET and/or performance related.