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In my day job I’m a .NET developer who delves into C++ every now and again. As a result I don’t spend much time having to much about with crash dumps and so on, but this week I’ve been on a Windows Internals given by Alex Ionescu (one of the authors of the Windows Internels book.) It wasn’t my intention to blog about this sort of stuff, but the week long course was an eye opener to what goes on “under the hood” of Windows. It wasn’t all new, I’ve been about a long while, but it was a real refresh on my understanding, and a wealth of new, detailed, information as well. The course was provided by the company I work for, and all I can say is that if you are asked if you want to attend one of these courses, say “yes” without any hesitation.

The course we took was aimed at developers and exposed the bowels of the Windows kernel, including memory management, thread scheduling, interrupt processing, time accounting, security, and crash dump analysis. The course included advanced explanations of windbg, Process Exploerer in particular, but a lot of the System Internals were touched upon somewhere during the course.

Just to reiterate: Get on one of these courses if you can.

By day I am a C#/SQL developer, and have been for… well, too long to remember. But now Android is here, and it is fascinating stuff, so now I develop Android apps in my spare time. There is a lot of stuff on the internet that has really helped get to grips with developing for Android, but quite often there was a step missing in the information that left me piecing bits together. So this blog will be about the blockers that I encounter as I learn.

Some of the stuff will be from other blogs, but the idea is not to regurgitate what others have done, but to provide complete solutions that others can use. I should have posted the missing details as comments on the blogs that I did find useful, but in my haste to get up-to-speed, I did not. That’s life. In the future I will add comments, as I hope readers of this blog will.

If I feel the urge I will post on C#, SQL and other developer type stuff along the way.