Charles is somewhat of a legend in Windows programming, but my perspective on him is that besides being incredibly smart, he’s a really nice and fascinating guy . He knows a lot of things about the history of computing and loves to pepper his programming books with wonderful anecdotes.

Here’s a great example from Programming in the Key of C#. Charles is explaining Booleans.

When you use Boolean expressions, it helps to know a couple of shortcuts, and in particular, De Morgan’s Theorem, which is named after British mathematician Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871) who, among other achievements, was math tutor to Augusta Ada, Countes of Leveleace, nee Byron (1815-1852). In 1843, Ada tranlated into English an Italian article about teh Analytical Engine of Charles Babbage(1792-1871) and also added some notes to the tranlation, including what is credited with being the first computer program (albeit for a macine that was never built). See how everything fits together? (p.153)

I would definitely recommend taking advantage of an opportunity to hear him interviewed on DotNetRocks. Carl and Charles and I had dinner together along with Dr. Neil and my husband, Rich, when we were in Redmond last month. So I have already had a taste of how fun and interesting this conversation is going to be.