A gratuitious trailer for TweetCraft, a World of Warcraft Twitter client.[more ]

The Microsoft SDL Process Template is a new process template for Visual Studio Team System intended to ease adoption of the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle. The template integrates the SDL directly into your software development environment, provides auditable security requirements and status, and demonstrates security return on investment.

I stopped by the Microsoft Security group and spoke with Jeremy Dallman about the SDL, and what it means for developers. The Process Template is free and can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com/SDL/.

Harry Shum is the VP of Engineering for Bing, Microsoft's latest search engine offering (well, it's more than a search engine - it's a so-called Decision Engine, but what does that mean, precisely?). Harry has a long history in the world of complex algorithm design and implementation. Before joining the Bing team (at Bill Gates' request), Harry was a reseacher in MSR specializing in computer vision, which is an algorithm instensive discipline rife with machine learning principles, statistics and in some sense artificial "intelligence" in terms of autonomous pattern recognition capability. At any rate, Harry is a developer and scientist through and through. We're very fortunate to have him running our search engineering efforts. General purpose search is an incredibly fascinating area with a great deal of potential, challenges and opportunities.

Erik Meijer, programming language designer, knight of the lamda calculus and Expert to Expert host, sits down with Harry to learn, at a high level (though deep in context), how Bing works, what, exactly, a decision engine is, what really happens when you Bing something and various topics related to the computation behind both general purpose search and accurately interpreting user intention. Of course, being an E2E, we take the conversation in many directions and Harry was a real sport. Thank you, Harry!

If you want to know the past, present and a little bit of the future of Bing technology, well, tune in and meet Harry Shum; a computer scientist, software developer and vice president.

Enjoy![more ]

What started out as an initiative to help middle school students learn about programming concepts has ballooned out into a great tool for all beginner programmers. It’s the Visual Studio Learning pack… and it’s ready for you to download.

This pack allows you to interactively step through concepts like sorting where you can visually represent the steps taken to algorithmically perform a sort. Pretty cool stuff.

My favorite part was the ability to have complicated arrays automatically constructed for me with the proper syntax with just a few clicks. This is a great teaching tool for instructors or for private use. Even experts may want that around just in case .

[more ]

Absolute Software, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, is the industry leader in Computer Theft Recovery, Data Protection, and Secure Asset Tracking solutions. The company provides individuals and organizations of all types and sizes with solutions to manage regulatory compliance, data protection, and theft recovery. The organization has 300 employees, including a team of 50 former law enforcement experts and private investigators. Absolute Software is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and a launch partner for Windows 7

Last week on this week on Channel 9 we announced a project that we’ll use to improve the user experience of Channel 9. This work along with improvements to our content strategy will enable us to bring Channels 8 and 10 content back into Channel 9.[more ]

The boys took over this week and it's clear we have a bro-mance in the making. If you've ever wondered what guys talk about when they're alone...now you know:

Paul Allen makes it big!
Ballmer makes a boo boo
Surface gets even cooler...
Real DaVinci footage
Security Beta

For Microsoft, 1995 was filled with Windows. On January 7, 1995, during his first keynote at the consumer electronics show in Vegas, Bill Gates announces Microsoft "Bob" for Windows. Microsoft and Dreamworks SKG announce that they have signed a joint-venture agreement to form a new software company and we announce internet explorer 1.0 for Windows 95.

Previous Episodes:

1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994

[more ]

As a developer, one of the common tasks that you do is move code around. In this video, I'll demonstrate how using the Outlining Expansion feature in Visual Studio makes it a whole lot easier to copy and paste entire methods or classes. The trick is using the CTRL+M, CTRL+M shortcut key to collapse bodies of code first. Enjoy the video!