About the Author

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John Robbins is an independent contractor and a developer based in New Hampshire. He lives with his wife, Pam, and the world-famous debugging cat, Pearl. He is also a contributing editor for Microsoft Systems Journal, where he writes the popular "Bugslayer" column. In his column, he discusses issues related to debugging, performance tuning, and team development. Additionally, he offers debugging seminars to companies throughout the world through David Solomon Expert Seminars (www.solsem.com). He is also a frequent speaker at developer conferences, including WinDev and WinSummit. John can be reached at www.jprobbins.com.

John was one of the first engineers at NuMega Technologies (now Compuware NuMega), where he was a key player in designing, developing, and managing many of the most-used and award-winning developer tools in the C/C++, Microsoft Visual Basic, and Java marketplace today. He worked on BoundsChecker (versions 3, 4, and 5), TrueTime (versions 1.0 and 1.1), TrueCoverage (version 1.0), SoftICE (version 3.24), and a product that hasn t been announced. He was also the only developer at NuMega with a couch in his office.

Prior to stumbling into software development in his late 20s, John was a paratrooper and Green Beret in the United States Army. Since he no longer gets the same adrenaline high that he used to jumping out of airplanes in the middle of the night onto an unlit, postage-stamp-size drop zone, with a full combat load, he rides motorcycles at high rates of speed—much to his wife s chagrin.