Raymond Chen

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Raymond Chen is a well-known developer on the Windows Shell team at Microsoft. Since joining Microsoft in 1992, Chen has worked on OS/2, Windows 95, DirectX, and later versions of Windows. Outside of Microsoft, he is known for his articles on Windows programming. He is a popular speaker at Microsoft PDCs and other conferences. He is also known for his dry humor[1] and his custom of wearing suits at work.[2][3]

Contents

[edit] Writings

[edit] Articles

Chen's blog, primarily aimed at software developers, focuses on the history of Windows programming and his own experience in ensuring its backwards compatibility. He is noted for his Psychic Debugging articles[4], as well as two useful types of thought experiments in software design: "Imagine if this were possible" and "What if two programs did this?".[5]

Chen also authors the Windows Confidential column for Microsoft's TechNet magazine, which explores similar subject matter.

[edit] Books

In 2005 he contributed an essay "Why Not Just Block the Apps That Rely on Undocumented Behavior?", adapted from his blog to Joel Spolsky's book The Best Software Writing I.[6]

Chen's first book, titled The Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows was published by Addison-Wesley in January 2007. The book is primarily a collection of essays on technical topics, some previously published as blog posts. [7]

[edit] Hobbies

His computer-unrelated hobbies, as described in his blog, include cooking, classical music, bicycling, and learning foreign languages (Swedish, German, and Mandarin Chinese). Chen created many early episode summaries of The Simpsons for the alt.tv.simpsons newsgroup. As he stated in his Microspotting interview, he is a "former knitter".

Before his career at Microsoft and lasting even into 1995, Raymond Chen identified himself as "just another Linux hacker" in his Usenet sig.[8] He is listed in the Linux kernel CREDITS file as "Author of Configure script".[9]

His favorite text editor seems to be vi.[10][11]

[edit] Quotations

One of the questions I get is, "My app is slow to start up. What are the super secret evil tricks you guys at Microsoft are using to get your apps to start up faster?" The answer is, "The super evil trick is to do less stuff." -- "Five Things Every Win32 Programmer Needs to Know" (16 Sept. 2005)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Raymond Chen. "'Quotable Raymond' Category". Mindless Bit Spew. http://blog.ryjones.org/category/work/microsoft/quotable-raymond/. Retrieved 2008-11-01. 
  2. ^ Kraig Brockschmidt. "Fade to Light (Chapter 16)". Mystic Microsoft. http://www.mysticmicrosoft.com/Chapter16.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-30. 
  3. ^ Raymond Chen (September 11, 2003). "You too can dress like Raymond". The Old New Thing. http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/11/54888.aspx. Retrieved 2006-12-30. 
  4. ^ Raymond Chen (March 21, 2005). "Psychic debugging: Why your expensive four-processor machine is ignoring three of its processors". The Old New Thing. http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/03/21/399688.aspx. Retrieved 2006-12-30. 
  5. ^ Raymond Chen (September 19, 2005). "PDC 05 Talk: Five Things Every Win32 Programmer Needs to Know". Professional Developers Conference. http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=116704&pvrid=114. Retrieved 2006-12-30. 
  6. ^ Joel Spolsky (June 20, 2005). "Introduction to Best Software Writing I". Joel on Software. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BestSoftwareWriting.html. Retrieved 2006-12-30. 
  7. ^ Raymond Chen (December 7, 2006). "Okay, I changed my mind, I wrote a book after all". The Old New Thing. http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/12/07/1233002.aspx. Retrieved 2006-12-30. 
  8. ^ Raymond Chen (June 7, 1993). "Patch for ISO9660 filesystem -- Another crufty disk hack". comp.os.linux. http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.os.linux/browse_thread/thread/17aa722d243cd192/7c233c9a9f97c5aa. Retrieved 2006-12-30. 
  9. ^ Linus Torvalds (September 16, 1996). "Linux kernel CREDITS". Kernel.org. http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/CREDITS. Retrieved 2006-12-30. 
  10. ^ Raymond Chen (Thursday, March 11, 2004 9:46 PM). "The layout of a COM object". The Old New Thing. http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/02/05/68017.aspx#88377. Retrieved 2009-04-01. 
  11. ^ Raymond Chen (Thursday, March 18, 2004 7:52 AM). "Why is the line terminator CR+LF?". The Old New Thing. http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/03/18/91899.aspx#91935. Retrieved 2009-04-10. 

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] External links

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