Windows Developer Power Tools

16.0 Introduction

You can learn quite a bit about developers based on how well they understand what’s going on under the covers of the technologies they work with. Great developers understand internals. Not only do they understand the how of things (calling this method yields that result), but they also have a good grasp on why things work the way they do (because the method takes this input and runs that algorithm on it).

Such knowledge is a tremendous benefit when things start to go wrong. Bugs and unintended results are much easier to track down when you know how the elements of your system fit together. Having a clear picture of how all the pieces in your system relate and interact with each other is critical to your ability to work productively and create high-quality software.

Unfortunately, you can’t get this kind of knowledge by skimming through the latest book promising to teach you development in an absurd number of hours simply by dragging controls onto a designer. That approach completely skips the fundamental hows and whys of a system’s operation. Instead, this critical knowledge is built through working with other smart folks and glomming off their experience and digging through documentation and good books, plus the good-old-fashioned hard way: rolling up your sleeves and diving into a system to learn its guts inside and out.

Chapter 8 discussed tools that help you build a picture of how things in your system relate. This chapter presents tools that dive down even further ...