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Anson Horton

2 Jan, 10 tweets, 3 min read

In 2001 I had only recently joined Microsoft full time, so I was really just getting my feet underneath me in the org. There were many internal teams using C#, so one of the things I owned was an internal DL called CSharp User Community which had thousands of folks on it.

The point of the DL was for C# users to ask questions of each other to get help as they needed it, but I did participate a lot as often folks would ask for definitive answers. The downside to this is that I often received a large number of mails throughout the day directly.

If I'd had some more experience, I would have added the user community back to the threads much more often than I did. Regardless, this ownership led to some funny and uncomfortable situations.

In one case, I got a mail around 5:30pm on a Thursday asking a question about why the JIT generated the x86 it did for some random C# code. This was honestly a common kind of question, but I didn't have time to look at it immediately.

By 9am the next day that same person had replied to the thread with the text "have you not replied because you don't know, or because you don't care?" Please don't ever send mails like this, it was absolutely soul crushing for me.

I wasn't really sure how to respond, so I asked my manager what the best reply would be. He wasn't impressed by the tone of the mail, so he replied and CC'd the person's manager (and I think his manager's manager) and said something along the lines of

"this kind of mail is not conducive to a long and successful career at Microsoft." We didn't get a reply, and just assumed that the person either decided their approach wasn't great, or that we, in fact, didn't know or care.

Fast forward a month or two, and I get a call from reception saying that I have a delivery. This was the first time I'd ever had a delivery at Microsoft, so I was both surprised and excited. I went down to pick up whatever it was and found it was… flowers. I was confused.

@therachelhorton

There was a tag, and it read "I hope we can still be friends," and it was signed by the person who had started the thread. I mean, I guess it was thoughtful, and it gave me the chance to tell @therachelhorton that someone sent me flowers at work :-)

It was actually the only time I've received flowers, so, there's that. Anyway, global lesson learned was to pay attention to how email was phrased, and also, here's a picture (my manager also got flowers):

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More from @AnsonHorton

Anson Horton

@AnsonHorton

3 Jan

Incremental rebuild was a feature of the C# compiler which was meant to increase the throughput after an initial build. It worked on the principle that changes in between builds are localized, and that the information gathered by the compiler from previous builds wouldn't be

entirely invalidated; specifically, some of the information and, indeed, the assembly itself could be updated in an incremental fashion resulting in faster builds.

Both the VS 2002 and VS 2003 compilers exposed this option through the /incr switch on the command line, and the ‘Incremental Rebuild’ option in the Advanced tab of Project Properties. In 2002 incremental rebuild was enabled by default for all project types.

Read 22 tweets

Anson Horton

@AnsonHorton

1 Jan

I was trying to remember any interesting event associated with a new year and the best I could come up with this morning is many years after what I've been tweeting about, in 2010. In 2010 we were working on Dev11 (VS 2012) and iterating closely with Windows on Windows 8.

I was leading a team to create a tooling experience for JavaScript Windows Store apps. Windows 8 was the introduction of the Windows Store and the new WinRT APIs, ABI format, etc. that allowed languages like JS, C#, VB .NET, C++, etc. to directly call the Windows API.

It was still early in Dev11 development, and my team was writing a new JavaScript language service (as well as a new project system). There was already an existing JS language service.

Read 22 tweets

Anson Horton

@AnsonHorton

31 Dec 20

1/ In early 2004 we were heads down executing on Edit and Continue across a large contingent of teams. There had been several iterations of scoping, redesigns, and customer feedback.

2/ We had a weekly meeting every Thursday morning when representatives from each of the teams would get together and review progress. It was fairly heavy weight, but there were so many teams involved that it was necessary to have a regular sync.

3/ Regardless, E&C was coalescing, but teams were stretched thin working diligently to enable scenarios, improve performance, fix bugs, etc. It had been a month or so since we decided to add support for C# to the matrix as well, so folks were a bit stressed.

Read 19 tweets

Anson Horton

@AnsonHorton

30 Dec 20

1/ Edit and continue was a beloved feature of VB6 and was a priority for making migration onto .NET easy for RAD developers. EnC is magical when it works correctly. For web developers that are used to hot reloading, it enables that type of rapid development, but maintains state.

2/ Unfortunately, it is an extremely difficult feature to implement in a JIT'ed world as we discovered that with .NET 1.0. We actually had a version of EnC in the early releases of VS 2002.

3/ I'm fairly sure it persisted all the way up to Beta 1, though the history of when we removed it is a little hazy. The initial implementation wasn't coalescing. There were a huge number of bugs, it performed poorly, and it often corrupted the debuggee.

Read 18 tweets

Anson Horton

@AnsonHorton

29 Dec 20

@werat

1/ @werat asked about whether the debugger was using the C# compiler or language service in VS 2002. It was not. The debugger has a component called an ‘expression evaluator’ that is provided per language and is responsible for parsing and evaluating expressions when stopped at a

2/ breakpoint. For example, if you type into the immediate window, hover over a variable, type into the watch window, etc. the expression evaluator is involved. The debugger and the language service are actually deeply integrated in a number of scenarios in VS, which may

3/ initially seem surprising. I may talk about more of these scenarios in the future, but to give a flavor, when you set a breakpoint at design time the language service is involved, when you are using Edit and Continue the LS is involved, the range of what is being evaluated

Read 14 tweets

Anson Horton

@AnsonHorton

28 Dec 20

1/ I haven't mentioned much about C# integration into Visual Studio yet, but at the same time we were working on creating a new language, a new runtime, and a new framework we also decided to take disparate shells (MSDEV, devenv, VB6) and combine them. This was… a lot.

2/ As you might expect, taking on so much at the same time meant a very long development cycle. For those folks using VS6 it was a long wait for VS7 (‘98 to ’02). Regardless, we wanted to continue to provide a compelling LOB (line of business) client app framework while also

3/ enabling web apps (via ASP.NET, web forms/services, etc.). The client app framework manifested as Windows Forms and was the next iteration of a RAD app creation environment. The Windows Forms designer is extremely rich and intended to make developing UI-rich

Read 15 tweets

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