Channel 9

Pex - Automated Exploratory Testing for .NET

briankel — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:56:00 GMT

Pex is a tool being developed by Microsoft Research which has the potential to dramatically improve the quality of software testing while requiring minimal, if any, effort on the part of the developer. Pex can automatically generate a set of inputs for a paramaterized unit test which can effectively excercise most, if not all, possible code paths.

I visited Nikolai Tillmann and Peli de Halleux on the Pex team for a closer look at this cool technology.

Microsoft Acquires Powerset

Dan — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:31:00 GMT

Things are heating up in the world of search! Today on the Live Search blog, Microsoft announced that it had acquired Powerset, a natural language and search company.

Check out the Powerset demo video to learn more.

Here's a snippet from the Live Search blog post:

[The] vision is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.

We know today that roughly a third of searches don't get answered on the first search and first click. Usually searchers find the information they want eventually, but that often requires multiple searches or clicks on multiple search results. Two specific problems are the most common reasons for this:

Differences in phrasing or context between a user's search and the way the same information is expressed on webpages. Search engines don't understand today that "shrub" and "tree" are similar concepts. We don't understand that "cancer" sometimes refers to a disease and sometimes refers to a horoscope and when a query or a webpage refers to which.

Lack of clarity in the descriptions for each webpage in the search results. Sometimes a result looks relevant from its short description on the results page but turns out to be not so relevant when you visit the actual page. As a result, searchers frequently click results and then rapidly click back when they realize they aren't what they're looking for.

You can try out the engine yourself by going to: www.powerset.com/explore/semhtml/SearchTermGoesHere
Here are the Powerset Search results for Channel 9

New PDC Sessions Posted

Dan — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:58:00 GMT

Mike Swanson and team have updated MicrosoftPDC.com to include a brand new set of PDC sessions. The new sessions cover a variety of topics including: The Future of Visual Basic, The Future of C#, Visual C++: 10 is the New 6, Project "Velocity", Architecture with VSTS Rosario, Data modeling for the cloud, and more. Check out the full session list for more information.

TechEd: Angus Logan on Windows Live

Dan — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:43:00 GMT

Angus Logan from the Windows Live team shares his thoughts on the evolution of Windows Live and Windows Live services, social networking, Live Mesh, and what it all means for developers.

Charles Teague: Building Windows Live Writer Plug-ins

Dan — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:07:00 GMT

Catherine Heller interviews Charles Teague on Windows Live Writer, a free and extensible desktop blogging application that can work with practically every blogging service available.

Charles discusses the Windows Live Writer SDK which includes a managed API for extending Live Writer. He demonstrates the Polaroid Picture Plug-in and also shows how to build a "Hello World" plug-in in Visual Studio. You can find more information including SDK updates on the Windows Live Writer blog.

TechEd Amanda Silver on Visual Basic 2008 and VB in the future

Dan — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:36:00 GMT

I caught up with Amanda Silver to discuss new for 2008 features like LINQ, XML Literals, using LINQ to target LINQ for .NET Framework 2.0. Amanda shares her thoughts on the future of dynamic typing in Visual Basic, runtime changes in edit-and-continue, how to make changes in pseudo-run mode, the challenges in adding IntelliSense for dynamic typing, and improving native/Pinvoke calls for .NET developers. Amanda also reveals her toughest feature cut that the team had to make for the VB 2008 release.

This Week on C9: Jeff Sandquist and Bill Gates stories

Dan — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:23:00 GMT

On a very special This Week on Channel 9, Jeff Sandquist joins Dan and Brian in studio to discuss

CNN's special Bill Gates slideshow narrated by Bill himself (0 - 2:00)
Newsweek's update of the infamous New Mexico Microsoft company photo 30 years later (2:00 - 3:30)
Jeff shares how Charles Torre got Chicken Pox after his BillG interview and retells the backstory of the first Bill Gates interview (3:30 - 6:10)
Clip from Charles interviews Bill Gates on his transition (6:10 - 8:00)
Clip from Bill Gates looking back video (8 - 9:24)
BillG's other achievement, redefining Cribs (9:24 - 12:45)
Jeff Sandquist recounts the backstory for when Channel 9 was there to break the news of Bill's transition and his history at Microsoft (12:45 - 20:15)
Clip from 'softies sharing their favorite BillG stories (20:15 - 23:15)
10 Tools I replaced with VSTS, 10 Tools I still use with VSTS by Mohammed Ashraful Alam (23:15 - 25:00)
CodeProject article: WPF version of PicLens by Sascha Barber and Marlon Grech (25:00 - 25:40)
CTP of Microsoft (Classic) ASP SQL Injection Analyzer via Greg Duncan (25:40 - 26:45)
Entity Framework: vote of no confidence and a response from Tim Mallalieu from the EF team (26:45 - 29:20)
Free eBook: Karl Seguin: Foundations of Programming, Building Better Software (29:20 - 30:20)
Derik Whittaker: Dimecasts.NET, 10 minutes or less on a developer topic via Rhonda Tipton (30:20 - 31:00)
Dan's Pick of the Week: If Programming Languages were Futurama characters via dzone (31:00 - 32:00)
Brian's Pick of the Week: 9-part series on VSTS Rosario by Willy-Peter Schaub (32:00 - end)

'Softies share their favorite Bill Gates stories

Dan — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:33:00 GMT

To remember Bill Gates's last day at Microsoft, we asked Larry Osterman, Bill Hill, Joan Hoshino, and Soma Somasegar to share their favorite Bill Gates stories.

Free eBook: Foundations of Better Programming

Dan — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:06:00 GMT

Karl Seguin recently released a great free 79 page eBook for .NET developers covering design patterns, unit testing, mock objects, memory management, object relational mapping, and more. Get it while it's free!

UGTV - a Family Friendly Format

Dan — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:08:00 GMT

User Group Television (UGTV pronounced YOU GEE TEE VEE) is a monthly video show dedicated to bringing informative programming to User Groups worldwide while providing Microsoft the ability to introduce up and coming information to user group communities as well as highlight our engagement with them.

Today's show includes more bad jokes from our anchors, interviews with UG leaders, a recap of April’s MVP Summit and an interview with INETA. (INETA’s mission is to offer assistance and resources to community groups that promote and educate their membership in Microsoft's .NET technologies). And…the crème de la creme – introducing a new segment coming to UGTV.

UGTV is hosted by Michelle Fleming Toure and Alan le Marquand.

Got Feedback? Email ugtvidea@microsoft.com

Angry Hacker: 10 Reasons why SQL 2008 is Going to Rock

Dan — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:37:00 GMT

AngryHacker has a great post on 10 new features coming in SQL 2008 that will make it rock and/or roll.

My favorites from his list that I didn't know about: SQL Management Studio Add-ins and new features for processing delimited strings.

Bill Gates: Transitioning into the Future

Charles — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:58:00 GMT

Bill Gates has been at the helm of Microsoft for the entire existence of Microsoft. It's the only place he's worked and he's getting ready to step down from his day to day responsibilities in his office on the Redmond campus. Bill's employment future will be centered around running his philanthropic enterprise, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill is fundamentally shifting his focus from achieving his dream of "a PC in every home" to helping realize the vision of "healthy people in every country". He talks about how each one of us can help make this dream come true by donation of time, expertise and, of course, money.

Charles caught up with Bill to discuss his transition from full time at Microsoft to full time at his global philanthropic foundation (he will still be involved with major decisions given that he will retain his post as the Chairman of Microsoft and his email address will still be functional ).

Questions addressed in this conversation include: What's on Bill's mind as he prepares to step away from his full time responsibilities at Microsoft? What was his rationale for making the decision? What was behind his decision to put Ray Ozzie in the role of Microsoft Chief Software Architect? What does a CSA actually do? Why is Microsoft so focused on competing with Google and is search as important as we think? What's top of mind for Bill that Developers who target our platform should pay attention to now and in the next decade? How can Microsoft become more agile given the complexity that arises from so much asynchronous innovation spanning disparate product units? Why does Windows still matter in an Internet world?

Enjoy. This is a good one. Thank you again, Bill, for your support of C9 over the years, the incredible innovation you brought to market and the incredible generosity of your foundation.

This Week on C9: Live Mesh, Popfly, Microspotting, Poker bots & more

Dan — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:04:00 GMT

This Week on Channel 9, Brian and Dan cover:

Updates to Live Mesh
Improve Desktop Search performance by downloading Windows Search 4.0
Lots of updates to Popfly Game Creator from Adam Nathan
The IE team sends Mozilla a congratulations cake (via Ars Technica)
Update your Silverlight.js file for Firefox 3 (via Tim Heuer)
DeepEarth: Virtual Earth + Deep Zoom (via Jamie Thomson)
Ariel Stallings from Microspotting designs cool I am the empire t-shirts
Video clip of Richard Sprague demoing Response Point and discussing how they used research to build voice grammars
Sourceforge Community Awards will include Codeplex projects
Soma discusses the Secure Development Lifecycle and how Microsoft uses it internally
Golf Course powered by Virtual Earth 3D (via Mark Brown)
Video clip of Tiger Electronics AMP robot
Brian's Pick of the Week: James Devlin: Building a Real-world Poker bot with C++ (via Avi Pilosof)
Dan's Pick of the Week: Walt Mossberg reviews GoGo: In-flight Wifi which will be coming to Virgin and American
After the end, Dan, Brian, and Laura Foy unwind at TechEd

C9 + C10 Fun at TechEd

Dan — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:43:00 GMT

One of the benefits of being in Orlando for TechEd is that after being at conference all day, you can relax and unwind by hitting an amusement park with our new BFF, Laura Foy, from the Channel 10 team. Here's a quick compilation of us unwinding after the last day at TechEd Developers Conference.

IE Team to Mozilla: Congratulations!

Dan — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:27:00 GMT

In what has now become a tradition, the Internet Explorer team sent a "Congratulations on Shipping!" cake to the Mozilla Foundation headquarters for shipping Mozilla Firefox 3.0. As you might be able to see in the picture, the ring around the Internet Explorer "e" is actually three-dimensional and it's certainly more fancy than the cake they previously sent Ryan Paul at Ars Technica

Ben Brauer and Richard Sprague: Response Point

Dan — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:32:00 GMT

Ben Brauer and Richard Sprague from Microsoft Research show off Response Point, a new Microsoft technology that makes it easy for small businesses to setup a professional phone system using voice over IP, speech recognition (using the Speech Server voice recognition engine), inbox voice mail, and more, all at a fraction of the cost. As mentioned in the demo, you can actually call Richard's Response Point phone number and try it out yourself!

DeepEarth: Virtual Earth using Silverlight Deep Zoom

Dan — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:57:00 GMT

DeepEarth is an open source community project that combines the interactive experience in Silverlight 2 Deep Zoom with photo tiles from Virtual Earth. The end result is a mapping mashup that beautifully zooms in and out. Try it yourself or watch the demo on YouTube.

Source: Alert C9'er Jamie Thomson

C9 Bytes: Lisa Feigenbaum on Visual Basic 2008 IDE Enhancements

Dan — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:55:00 GMT

Lisa Feigenbaum demos the new IDE enhancements for Visual Basic including contextual IntelliSense, keyword support, and XML literals which enable you to embed VB expressions in XML.

C9 Bytes: Alex Turner showing the evolution of C#

Dan — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:50:00 GMT

In this C9 Byte, Alex Turner walks through how the C# language has evolved between version 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 for working with data structures. If you don't know Alex, he's the guy that got Anders Hejlsberg to pay him $202 when he was an intern.

BlueHat: Cesar Cerrudo on token kidnapping in Windows

Dan — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:48:00 GMT

Katie Moussouris interviews Cesar Cerrudo on token kidnapping in Windows at BlueHat v7, Microsoft’s security conference. Cesar talks about design weaknesses that allow elevation of privilege in Windows. Even Cesar says we have a hard job in trying to protect users, while making sure we don’t break anything.

BlueHat: Manuel Caballero & Fukami on scripts, cross-domain attacks, and Flash/Silverlight security

Dan — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:59:00 GMT

Katie Moussouris interviews Manuel Caballero & Fukami on resident scripts and global cross domain attacks, plus a comparison of Flash and Silverlight security at BlueHat v7, Microsoft’s security conference. Manuel takes us through the scary world of resident scripts that invisibly follow you while you surf. Fukami performs security analysis of similar browser plug-in technologies: Flash and Silverlight.

BlueHat: Dan Kaminsky on security threat research

Dan — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:39:00 GMT

Katie Moussouris interviews interviews Dan Kaminsky on some interesting research he’s been doing lately at BlueHat v7, Microsoft’s security conference. Dan has a way of turning even the scariest of security threats into an opportunity to RickRoll. Count the number of times we say “RickRoll” during this enlightening interview.

BlueHat: Alex “kuza55” K. on client-side issues with browsers, plug-ins, and web applications

Dan — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:39:00 GMT

Katie Moussouris interviews Alex “kuza55” K. on interesting client-side issues when you look at browsers, plug-ins, and web applications together at BlueHat v7, Microsoft’s security conference. Alex examines esoteric parts of browsers and plug-ins which lead to web applications being exploitable via client-side issues.

BlueHat: SoWhat from Nevis Labs on fuzzing anti-virus products

Dan — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:38:00 GMT

Katie Moussouris interviews SoWhat from Nevis Labs based in Bejing on fuzzing anti-virus products at BlueHat v7, Microsoft’s security conference. SoWhat describes some of the common application security testing methodologies as they apply to security products. Who’s watching the watchers, and what can AV software vendors do to improve their products.

BlueHat: Billy Rios on what the phishers are up to

Dan — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:37:00 GMT

Katie Moussouris interviews Billy Rios on what the phishers are up to at BlueHat v7, Microsoft’s security conference. Billy describes the interesting results of his research with fellow speaker Nitesh Dhanjani. Learn if these phishers are really the Einsteinian Ninja Hackers the media portrays them to be.

BlueHat: Bryan Sullivan on being a Microsoft Security Grunt

Dan — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:35:00 GMT

Katie Moussouris interviews Bryan Sullivan on what it’s like to be a Microsoft Security Grunt at BlueHat v7, Microsoft’s security conference. Bryan counters the Popular Science Top Ten Worst Jobs in Science with his take on what it’s really like to work for the group that is responsible for securing Microsoft’s current and future products.

STL Iterator Debugging and Secure SCL

Charles — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:28:00 GMT

The Visual C++ runtime library now detects incorrect iterator use and will assert and display a dialog box at run time. To enable debug iterator support, a program must be compiled with a debug version of a C run time library (see C Run-Time Libraries for more information).

See Checked Iterators for more information on using iterators.

The C++ standard describes which member functions cause iterators to a container to become invalid. Two examples are:

Erasing an element from a container causes iterators to the element to become invalid.
Increasing the size of a vector (push or insert) causes iterators into the vector container become invalid.

Here, VC++ Software Engineer Stephan T. Lavavej digs into the details of STL Iterator Debugging including its implementation, usage scenarios and interesting facts you may not find anywhere else (Channel 9 goodness). Stephan is known as STL (this is his name's acronym, by coincidence or perhaps it's simply prophetic since Stephan is a passionate advocate for STL, as you will no doubt understand after watching and listening to this conversation). Stephan also dives a bit into Secure SCL, which is part of the VC++ Safe Libraries.

Stephan does not possess a marketing bone in his body as you can tell by his commentary that's weaved into his informal presentation of advanced topics. I love this. He speaks his mind freely, though with fairness, and that's the only way to be.

Enjoy!

This Week on Channel 9: Clint Rutkas stops by, Project Velocity, Live Writer SDK, C9 bytes on IIS 7.0 and F#, and shameless self-promotion

Dan — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:51:00 GMT

This Week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian are joined by Clint Rutkas and we discuss:

Clint talks about MS 101 (0 - 1:00)
SQL Server 2008 RC0 is now available (and we don't know why some teams start with a zero based array and others don't) (1:00 - 2:30)
CTP of Project codename "Velocity" available, a Distributed object cache for Windows (2:30 - 3:40)
New CTP for the Windows Live Writer SDK including a Twitter and DiggThis example and another Live Writer plug-in by Alik Levin for building Blog Post Templates (3:40 - 5:28)
Scott Hanselman's BabySmash app makes Lifehacker (5:28 - 6:36)
Drew Robbins demos the IIS 7.0 Admin Pack (6:36 - 9:58)
Luke Hoban demos visualizing data using F# (9:58 - 13:23)
Templex a Template Process Library for Team Foundation Server (13:23 - 15:04)
Codeplex now include syntax highlighting for source code (15:04 - 16:00)
xgamer posts on CamSpace in the Coffeehouse with demo goodness (16:00 - 17:57)
Brian and Clint viciously throw 9 guys at Dan's head...in slow motion (17:57 - 18:11)
Zafer Savas releases a cool Codeproject article showing eye tracking with a Web cam using C++ (18:46 - 19:30)
Clint's Pick of the Week: Gary Farr's Coding4Fun RetroCommand arcade game using Silverlight and Expression Blend 2.5
Brian's Pick of the Week: The PDC ShowOff contest is launching with Brian and Dan hosting the event live at PDC (19:30 - 21:48)
Dan's Pick of the Week: Dan plugs his Coding4Fun talk at TechEd which showed off YouTube, iTunes, Zune, P2P, and Warcraft programming (21:48 - )

Hal Howard, Mike Ehrenberg, Sukumar Rathnam chat about Dynamics AX 2009

benriga — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:23:00 GMT

Last week the Dynamics AX team announced general availability of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009. While the team was basking in the glow of a job well done I grabbed a few folks for a chat. In this Channel 9 video I sit down with Hal Howard, Mike Ehrenberg and Sukumar Rathnam. Hal is the General Manager for Dynamics ERP (he runs the R&D for all ERP products at Microsoft). Mike is senior architect for the entire Dynamics team. He’s also a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer. Sukumar is Architect for Dynamics AX.

In our short chat we talk about a lot of different topics. Of course, Dynamics AX is an ERP product and there are numerous new features for customers using the product (literally hundreds of new features actually). For this chat we focused completely on the ISV and SI developer experience. Dynamics AX 2009 takes a major step forward in integrating itself into the Microsoft stack. That includes deep integration of web services with Windows Communication Foundation, process workflow with Windows Workflow Foundation, storage, reporting and business intelligence with SQL Server, a brand new role-tailored user experience in either a rich client built entirely in .NET or a web client built entirely in SharePoint/ASP.NET, and finally tight integration of unified communication with Office Communication Server/Office Communicator. I definitely need to dive into some of these in more detail. Look for more Ch9 videos on these topics soon.

I think Sukumar said it best: “Grab Windows Server 2008; Go get SQL Server 2008; Get Visual Studio 2008, Add AX 2009 and go party with it. Go write some code.”