About Me

My name is Mark Downie, I have spent over 20 years engineering solutions for customers. I worked as a technical lead in the field of software engineering and development, with expertise in financial services, healthcare and manufacturing industries. I have over 15 years experience mentoring and developing international, multi-disciplined groups (more background info here).

I am currently working for a Microsoft as a Product Manager, spending my days building debugging and diagnostics tooling for Visual Studio and Azure. I also serve as the primary maintainer for one of the oldest .NET open source projects, DasBlog Core.

The most persistent function of this site is a platform to talk about software and technology, and the various ways it can transform the lives of everyday people. I do hope you find something helpful. If you feel inclined please subscribe here.

If you have general questions contact me on Bluesky or GitHub.

Bio

Mark Downie is a seasoned technology leader and innovator based in the Columbus, Ohio Metropolitan Area. He currently serves as a Principal Product Manager at Microsoft, where he focuses on removing the friction in technology.

With over 20 years of hands‑on experience engineering solutions for customers across the financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing sectors, Mark has a proven track record of mentoring and leading multi‑disciplinary, international teams to deliver high‑impact software products.

An open‑source advocate, he is the primary maintainer of DasBlog Core, one of the oldest .NET open‑source projects, where he continues to drive community engagement and improvements.

Outside of his day‑to‑day at Microsoft, Mark writes extensively on his blog (poppastring.com), sharing deep dives into software engineering, tooling, and the broader cultural impacts of technology. His writings aim to inspire both seasoned developers and everyday users by illustrating how well‑designed tools can transform our interactions with technology and, ultimately, our daily lives.

Some Media

I really enjoy talking about software, debugging and diagnostics you can better understand my process and approach by looking at these videos and podcasts. Here is a Playlist of my most recent conferences and talks on YouTube.

Other parts of the web

• Visual Studio 2022 17.3 Preview 2 is now available as a native Arm64 application on Windows 11! - This will be the first version of Visual Studio that will natively support building and debugging Arm64 apps on Arm-based processors.
• Managed Memory Dump Analyzers - With the release of Visual Studio 2019 16.9 you can try out our new managed memory dump analyzers to help you root cause the issues that plague your applications in production.
• Cross Platform Managed Memory Dump Debugging - You now have the ability to open and analyze managed dumps collected on Linux and use the best in class debugging tools available in Visual Studio.
• Disassembly improvements for optimized managed debugging - If you are focused on squeezing out the last bits of performance for your .NET service or application, you might choose to take advantage of JIT compiler optimizations. However, debugging optimized code can be a challenge. In this blog I’ll show you how the Disassembly Window can help you debug optimized code.
• Decompilation of C# code made easy - Have you ever experienced an exception occurring in a 3rd party .NET assembly but had no source code to figure out why? You can now use Visual Studio to decompile managed code even if you don't have the symbols, allowing you to look at code, inspect variables and set breakpoints.
• Seeking out vulnerabilities in your software before the criminals do.