In my opinion, what seperates the "wo/men from the mice" in the world of software development is the tools. I have known some incredibly brilliant individuals who could wip out some of the cleanest, fastest algorithms I'd ever seen, yet they were burned when it came time to develop real-world software because somebody with half their talent knew how to engage the debugger in the right fashion, or they knew how to use perfmon, etc. etc. etc. These days my mantra is "Resist the urge to overcomplicate your life", and if you're a developer, that often means getting to know your tools a bit better.
A few questions to ask yourself:
- If you were developing a heavily multithreaded application in .NET (client-side) and it deadlocked on a test machine, would you kill the process and inspect the debug logs or would you attach a remote debugger to the process and identify exactly where the threads were hung?
- If you had code that needed to be transferred from one developer to another (say you had a bit of source you wanted to share), would you email it to them as a copy-paste and leave it be from there, or would you instruct them how to use code-snippets in Visual Studio to better the source and share it with everyone else?
- How many know how to use WinDBG? SOS (Son of Stike)?
- Do you have debugging symbols enabled on your machine and those of your testers? Do you have a symbol server? Do you know what that is?
- When was the last time you enabled tracing in your ASP.NET application to fix a performance issue? Did you immediately hit the source code or did you let the tools work for you?
- FXCop?
- Have you ever ran your application against perfmon? Have you ever used perfmon's remote machine feature?
The list goes on and on. The important thing to remember, though, is that at the end of the day you will have to fight with code that is insanely complicated, distributed and (often) not yours - if you try to fix/find/discover/analyze a code problem through code, you're probably looking at it from the wrong level; there are many, many great applications out there (for free or that come with Visual Studio) that will mitigate your problems and reduce the amount of time needed to identify bugs.
So, before you start your next task ask yourself if you're doing everything you can to not overcomplicate your life....
