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[VSD] Heeeere's Barry!

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Every so often, you run into people who make your jaw drop and make you go "Wow!". During my first few days on VSD, my jaw was permanently glued to the ground when I heard about Barry Bond (who is an architect on our team). What do you say about someone who has a resume which looks like this

- Dev on VBA
- Dev on DOSWOW on Windows
- Co-designed the Wx86 emulator
- Designed and built WOW64 which lets 32 bit apps run on 64 bit Windows
- Lead the Rotor project. If you are on the Rotor lists, you would know Barry well.
- Designed and built the device emulator that is shipping with Visual Studio in Devices in Whidbey
- And god knows how many other virtual machines he's written when he's bored on a Sunday afternoon! :-)

To give you an example of how Barry has had a huge impact on device development, here's an anecdote Amit Chopra told me (this happened 2-3 years ago -way before I joined the team). In VSD Everett, we didn't have an in-house emulator per-se. We shipped the Connectix-built emulator which emulated the x86 architecture. Now, though it was a great piece of work in itself, customers ran into issues as several devices were based on the ARM architecture, requiring recompilation of binaries when you move from the emulator to the actual device. We had heard quite a bit of feedback around this and we needed an ARM emulator that was as good if not better than the one in Everett. At this point, Barry and his team (which at that time was just Barry and one intern) stepped up to the plate and jumped into this fulltime.

 One fine morning, there was a team wide meeting where everyone got to see the results of this device emulator project. Quite a few jaws were on the floor back then - it's not everyday that you see a brand new emulator booting up! Of course, it lacked the shine and polish you see today but what has been incredible is the work put in since Everett. The device emulator project lead by Barry, had pulled off what many had thought to be impossible!

The great news is that he has finally started blogging! Without further ado, let me quote Paramesh by saying 'Heeeeeeeeere's Barry!'

P.S I should add that if you want to see him in person, don't miss his session with Amit Chopra at the PDC.