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 leads both software engineering and product development teams, and has deep expertise in variety of sectors including finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. He has more than a decade of experience in mentoring and leading diverse, international developer and production support teams. Mark is currently a Principal Product Manager at Microsoft, where he develops tooling for Visual Studio, .NET, and Azure.

Mark is also passionate about open source and blogging. He is the main contributor to DasBlog Core, one of the oldest .NET open-source projects. He also writes regularly about software and technology (poppastring.com/blog), and how they can impact culture and transform the lives of everyday people.

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.