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Comedian Bill Burr decided to learn how to play drums in his 40s, a curiously late time in life to take on such a demanding activity, and one that has absolutely nothing to do with how he earns a living. By all accounts, however, he’s killing it, and despite his joking on the topic, he’s become well-respected as a drummer. This kind of success isn’t guaranteed, but for anyone who’s not a bright-eyed youngster with their whole life in front of them, it’s an encouraging reminder that we can learn new things later in life too.

I mention this now because I’ve spent the past several years---roughly the time since I co-founded Thurrott.com---reviving my programming skills, such as they are. I had come into this industry in the early 1990s with the goal of becoming a software developer. And when I became a writer, most of what I wrote about in the early days was developer-related. That quickly expanded into more general writing about Windows, Microsoft, and personal computing, but I remained active in software development until my sites were purchased in 2000 by Duke Publishing of Windows NT Magazine fame.

This background helped me in my conversations with Microsoft’s engineers, where it was quickly established that I had a deeper technical understanding of their work than most of the reporters and bloggers that they spoke with. And it helped me better frame the creation of technologies like .NET, web services, and Azure even though I was no longer writing and maintaining code by that time. Sometimes life takes you down certain paths.

That said, I never lost my interest in this topic, and I spent the intervening 15 years or so monitoring everything that was going on in the Microsoft developer space, especially, and also outside of Microsoft to a lesser degree. I never fully walked away from it.

But programming is like golf: you can’t just dabble in it from time to time, you have to actually do the thing and do so regularly. The trick was figuring out a way to integrate this activity into my schedule non-disruptively. People often obsess over saving time, but when you care about something enough, you make the time. For me, a big catalyst was my work on the Programming Windows series, which I’m now turning into a book called Windows Everywhere. That series provided a nice, nostalgic reminder of the software development work I had participated in with technologies like Microsoft BASIC, Visual Basic, Visual C++ and MFC, COM/DCOM/COM+, and more. And it was thrilling to work in the developer environments of that day again and, in some cases, bring my old code back to life.

But it was also a kind of amuse bouche, if you will, a way of greasing the wheels for what I was looking forward to even more: this series would give me the opportunity to experience the .NET and WinRT era technologies that I had only viewed from afar, had followed but not actively worked with. And if you read along as I wrote that series, you know th...