charles

IE 8: Dev Tools - An Introduction with John Hrvatin

Charles — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:20:00 GMT

John Hrvatin, Program Manager of Internet Explorer Developer Tools sits down with me to discuss at a high level the new additions to IE 8's developer tools (aka Dev Tools). These include JavaScript performance profiling, CSS profiling and formatting exploration. And, there's more. :)

This is a conversation that addresses more than what's new in dev tool world. We also tackle some harder questions and learn a bit about John. We will be doing some deep dives on some the new IE 8 dev tools enhancements in upcoming interviews with the developers who wrote them.

Tune in.

Windows Home Server: PDC 08, New Features, Meet some of the Team

Charles — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:36:00 GMT

Windows Home Server is evolving. To learn about how to take advantage of the new capabilities of Windows Home Server, we sit down with Program Manager MCJ Saretto, Product Manager Mark Pendergrast and Software Developer Brendan Grant, aka dahat on Channel 9. Yes! Another Niner joins the ranks of Microsoft! Brendan is well known for the great add-ins he's written for Windows Home Server and, equally as important, for the full size Channel 9 Guy costume he created a few years back. Welcome aboard, dahat! It's great to have another excellent developer join the Happy Death Star.

Tune in the learn a bit about the next release of Windows Home Server, what devs will get to program against and meet some of the people who passionately drive Windows Home Server evolution. As always, the conversation is non-linear with a splash of fun and an extra helping of humanity. Windows Home Server is a great product and these folks are part of the reason why.

Enjoy!

Links galore:

Channel 10 Interview (with a first look at new Windows Home Server hardware)

Windows Home Server team blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/

Windows Home Server dev center on MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/bb981194.aspx

SDK:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb425866.aspx

Product website:
www.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver

Community forums:
http://forums.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver/default.aspx?siteid=50

Our top Windows Home Server ‘enthusiast’ site:
www.wegotserved.co.uk (not affiliated with MSFT)

IE 8: Privacy - It's about more than cookies

Charles — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:46:00 GMT

When you navigate your browser to website A is website A the only site you're visiting?

IE 8 Beta 2 is almost out of the oven. Given this, we of course want to find out all about it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Enter General Manager of Team Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, and Program Manager Andy Zeigler. The topic of this particular conversation (other IE8 interviews are in the pipeline) is a complex and important one: User Privacy and what IE 8 will do to inform users and protect their personal information when surfing the Internet.

Dean and the IE team are very passionate (and very serious about) user privacy. It’s a hard problem for a browser to solve, but a browser is the first line of defense and can therefore supply users with helpful information regarding what websites are involved with a particular session. Andy Zeigler is the Program Manager of the new Privacy features in IE 8. Dean and Andy shed light onto exactly what's been done in the realm of Privacy in IE 8 Beta 2. Two core new Privacy mechanisms are present in IE 8: InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Blocking (with InPrivate Subscriptions, a feed-based blocking service). We of course address more than the What, however, as you'd expect from Channel 9. Is true privacy on the Internet even achievable (is anonymity possible given the architecture and implementation of the Internet)? What role can a web browser play in protecting a user's personally identifiable data?

Tune in. This is a great conversation.

Synchronizing Data: Inside the Microsoft Sync Framework

Charles — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:16:00 GMT

The Microsoft Sync Framework is a comprehensive synchronization platform that enables collaboration and offline scenarios for applications, services and devices. It supports any kind of data type and any kind of data store. The framework was designed to be transfer protocol independent and to allow the developers to map any kind of network topology.

Here, Software Developers Aaron Greene, Andrei Maksimenka and Niner intern Christian "LittleGuru" Liensberger sit down with me to dig into the details of the Sync Framework and explore the complexities of sync, generally. As usual, the conversation winds down many roads and it's a great discussion (yes, it's a tad long, but find some time. It's worth it...). It's always a pleasure to chat with the folks who write the platforms and frameworks we depend on to get our algorithms written in efficient ways. The Sync Framework enables several interesting scenarios, most of which have yet to be thought up.Thanks guys!

Oh, and by the way, I hear that LittleGuru is doing a smashingly great job in his role as a PM for the Sync Framework team. Right on, LittleGuru! Go Niners! :)

Check out the Microsoft Sync Framework team blog. The team is very much engaged with developers who use our framework and monitor the forums very closely. Aaron and Andrei spend a good deal of time on the forums, just as many devs do in support of their products around the company.

Gabriel Aul: N-State Chaos and Windows Performance

Charles — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:09:00 GMT

Gabriel Aul is a 16 year Microsoft veteran who has always had his hand in the chaotic world of system performance and reliability, from technical product support and testing to being a leader on the Windows performance team. In fact, he was part of the team that developed the original Watson failure reporting tool. He's a dev at heart (once a dev, always a dev) and understands the complexities of Windows as a platform: Windows supports thousands of devices and the thousands of drivers that make them useful to users (devices sometimes have more than one driver, so add that to the complexity quotient...). How can so many devices (drivers) work together successfully (meaning not hosing the system) with so many supported configurations and possibilities for drivers to bring Windows to a screeching halt (think about task scheduling, resource allocation, background processing, foreground processing user mode code execution, kernel mode code execution and the sheer amount of concurrent running code, all over the place, all contending for Windows' attention...).

The world of Windows as platform is incredibly complex (n-state chaotic). It's amazing, actually, that the chaos doesn't lead to more performance and reliability issues. The Windows performance team has some really powerful tools (and an effort called Velocity) that can help ISVs find highly complex performance issues. Gabriel touches on this in this conversation and we address the continued need for more guidance and samples for developers.

One thing is for sure: The developers who write applications and drivers for Windows are great developers. You are craftsman, artists. Windows is a great platform in many ways because of the people who innovate on top of it. You know who you are. Yeah, you. Thank you.

Windows Vista - 64 bit in the Mainstream

Charles — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:46:00 GMT

Gary Schare and Bruce Burns sit down (well, sort of, Bruce stands, Gary leans) with us to talk about the sudden uptake of the latest Windows 64 bit client OS. It's very encouraging that Windows 64 is finding its way onto consumer client systems and into mainstream computing. This spike in uptake also poses some challenges for ISVs who are not 64 bit "ready". 32 bit Windows applications should just work on 64 bit Windows, right? Well, sort of. Tune in.

Vince Orgovan: Windows Vista Telemetry

Charles — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:21:00 GMT

Windows Vista contains a much improved telemetry system that collects fault data and sends detailed reports to Microsoft that are used in fixing problems that cause apps to hang/crash (of course, this data only reaches us if you choose to send it...). What have we learned so far? What does Microsoft actually do with crash data? How do crash reports turn into bug fixes that make their way up to Windows Update or, more commonly, into third party application updates?

Meet Vince Orgovan. Vince leads the Windows reliability and analysis team who are tasked with analyzing crash data and isolating problems that cause applications to fault on Windows. Vince is very passionate about quality and his team works tirelessly to isolate problems that lead to crashes. Here, we learn about what we've learned from all the telemetry data we've gathered from Vista and Vince provides insights into the state of health of Vista in the wild. This is a great conversation. Enjoy!

C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

Charles — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:36:00 GMT

What's the C# team up to these days? Who's on the C# 4.0 design team, anyway? With the looming problem of manycore facing developers now and certainly in the near future (to a much greater extent - programming for 80 core (asymmetric to boot) processors, anyone?). I thought it was time to find out what Anders et al are working on to get a clear sense of C#'s near (and not-so-near) future so I asked if I could come to one of their design meetings to have an informal chat (are we ever formal on C9?) and meet the people behind the next iteration of the most popular .NET programming language.

There are some new faces (and some old ones (not in terms of age, mind you :)). As expected, merging functional constructs into imperative C# are still top of mind for the C# design team. Here, you'll meet some new programming language gurus and some old time Niners (you'll recall the great Eric Lippert. He was in fact the very first developer we interviewed for C9 back in 2004 - even though his was not the first interview posted, it was the first one shot and the one where Lenn, Jeff, Scoble, Bryn and myself looked at each other and said "wow, we are on to something here!".).

C# 4.0 will contain many new features that will help developers be, yeah, you've heard it before, more productive. There's also some very interesting work going on with adding dynamic constructs to the language, which is of course very interesting given the static nature of the C# language.

In this video you will not get any specific details since the C# team wants to reveal exactly what they've done at PDC 2008. That said, you'll still get a very clear sense of what they've been up to and where they're taking the language.

It's always a pleasure to chat with Anders and team. I think you'll enjoy this one. On a personal note, I was coming down with a cold during this interview so please excuse the asking of the same question more than once (though in a different context). Oh, the joys of cold medicine. You know, the same stuff Lenn was on when he conceived the idea of Channel 9 several years ago.

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.

Inside Silverlight 2 Beta 2

Charles — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:12:00 GMT

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 has been released. We wanted to meet some of the developers of this SL incarnation to learn firsthand about what's in the bits. One of the truly cool new features in this release is Adaptive Streaming, which adds a programmable abstraction on top of media bit rates giving developers fine-grained control over Silverlight media streaming characteristics. What does this mean, exactly? Tune in.

Silverlight Development Lead Mark Alcazar, Silverlight Principal Group Program Manager Joe Stegman and Silverlight Senior Program Manager Lead Vivek Dalvi have all the answers.

This is a highly informative, casual and fun conversation with some of the development leaders behind Silverlight, which has evolved nicely in this most recent incarnation.

Enjoy.

UGTV (User Group Television) for Developer Debuts!

Charles — Wed, 28 May 2008 23:29:00 GMT

User Group Television (UGTV) is a monthly webcast 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 an interview with Trisha Cardell, US Subsidiary Sr. Marketing Manager focused on Developer user groups, a demo on ADO.Net with Rob Bagby, and an interview with John Martin from Server and Tools Online regarding advancements in the Community Platform.

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

Got Feedback? Email ugtvidea@microsoft.com

MSDN/TechNet Site Redesign: More Useful, Better Experience and Search Really Works :)

Charles — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:58:50 GMT

MSDN and TechNet have been re-skinned and re-built from the ground up to offer developers and IT Pros a better experience across the board. Much of the work that the team did was based on your feedback. MSDN/TechNet are now on the same codebase and it's more performant, more scalable, and, frankly better to look at :). Oh, and search actually works as you'd expect/hope! Right on!

Great work, MSDN team!

I sat down with Al Valvano, Group Manager and Dan Ledrick, Senior Lead PM to talk about the new incarnations of our developer and IT Pro technical resources.

Enjoy.

MSDN Social Platform: Social Bookmarking, User Profile, Enhanced Forums

Charles — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:39:37 GMT

MSDN has been the de facto place on the web to find all things Microsoft platform developer related. It's not always been perfect, but certainly most Microsoft platform focused developers require MSDN to complete their missions and to learn about new possibilities based on the latest platform innovations. The MSDN team has been hard at work creating some interesting community features with the primary goal of enabling MSDN users to add significant value to their peers via forums, wikis and other social constructs. New on this list of communityware on MSDN is Social Bookmarking and enhanced user Profile. I caught up with some of the folks behind this work to chat about the What, How and Why...

Meet Chris Slemp, PM Profile, Taylor Parsons, Lead PM Social Bookmarking, Brent Serbus, PM Forums and Bryan Thomas, Dev Lead Social Bookmarking.

Expert to Expert: Contract Oriented Programming and Spec#

Charles — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:27:52 GMT

The Spec# programming system is a new attempt at a more cost effective way to develop and maintain high-quality software. Spec# is pronounced "Spec sharp" and can be written (and searched for) as the "specsharp" or "Spec# programming system". The Spec# system consists of:

The Spec# programming language. Spec# is an extension of the object-oriented language C#. It extends the type system to include non-null types and checked exceptions. It provides method contracts in the form of pre- and postconditions as well as object invariants.

The Spec# compiler. Integrated into the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment for the .NET platform, the compiler statically enforces non-null types, emits run-time checks for method contracts and invariants, and records the contracts as metadata for consumption by downstream tools.

The Spec# static program verifier. This component (codenamed Boogie) generates logical verification conditions from a Spec# program. Internally, it uses an automatic theorem prover that analyzes the verification conditions to prove the correctness of the program or find errors in it.

A unique feature of the Spec# programming system is its guarantee of maintaining invariants in object-oriented programs in the presence of callbacks, threads, and inter-object relationships.

The Spec# programming system is being developed as a research project at Microsoft Research in Redmond, primarily by the Programming Languages and Methods group.

Here, Expert to Expert guest expert and programming language guru Erik Meijer chats with MSR researchers and spec# designers Wolfram Schulte, Rustan Leino and Peter Mueller. We dig into the details of Spec# and contract oriented programming in general. Plenty of code on the screen and lots of deep conversation. Just how we like it for Going Deep and Expert to Expert.

Enjoy!

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Carolyn Napier: Developing for Windows and Playing Pro Football

Charles — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:24:53 GMT

Carolyn Napier is a 9 year Microsoft veteran and she’s actually one of the truly technical women we’ve interviewed on WM_IN in a while (a former programmer she’s now a principal development lead on the Windows Application Platform team within the Core Operating System Division), but watch the whole interview and towards the end you’ll get the real scoop on Carolyn which really excited both Charles and Ritzy: Carolyn is a PROFESSIONAL football player!! Carolyn’s a member of The Seattle Majestics, the local women’s professional football team where she plays a rover on defense and a wide receiver on offense. This isn’t flag football, this is serious hardcore tackle football that is played with NFL’s regular rules (yes, she has a lot of bruises!). And guess what? As an athlete, there are many analogies Carolyn can draw between things that happen on the job and things that happen on the field. Go number 29!

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Algorithms and Data Structures: Mike Swanson - Genetic Session Scheduler

Charles — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:46:07 GMT

Mike Swanson is at it again. You've seen Mike on Channel 9 before and you've probably used his SWF to XAML converter that he wrote a while back. His latest side project promises to be quite useful for conference owners who have the complex task of planning sessions for big technical events like PDC or TechED. In fact, Mike is the PDC08 content owner and this task falls squarely on his shoulders. Instead of littering his office with Post-It notes that represent sessions, speakers, session times and locations, he decided to write an algorithm to solve his problem, specifically a genetic algorithm.

This is the first epsiode of a new series on Channel 9, Data Structures and Algorithms, that will focus on, well, data structures and algorithms :) Each episode will feature an engineer at a whiteboard discussing solutions to algorithms that they invented or improved upon. There are many clever people who write code for Microsoft and Channel 9 will continue to highlight them and their work. This new series is an attempt to really focus the conversation to one problem and it's algorithmic solution (which will often involve the advent of new data structures).

Enjoy. Mike is as much an engineer as he is a technical evangelist. His genetic session scheduler is an innovative approach to solving a problem rife with tediousness. Well done, Mike!

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Russell Hadley: The Route to C++ Code Optimization

Charles — Tue, 20 May 2008 18:43:14 GMT

It's nice to write clean code (code that looks good, is organized, is easy for others to understand by reading it, etc). As developers we get to use great tools to implement algorithms in our favorite languages. The act of composing a program is much like that of writing a story or, in some cases, a poem :) But the underlying hardware isn't much interested in intelligent class hierachies and easy-to-understand lines of programming language syntax. Processors do not speak C++ or Java or C# or VB, etc.

The focus of this interview is mapping the (long and complicated)path to executable machine code that the machine natively understands and acts upon, bringing your code to life. How does this work, exactly?

Russell Hadley is a senior developer on the C++ team here at Microsoft and he spends his days (and nights, ocassionally) writing code that takes the front-end compilation linear (flattened) blob and turns it into highly optimized machine code patterns that the processor can execute in a highly efficient manner.

This is a deep interview with lots of whiteboarding, but it is shallow enough so you won't drown if you can't swim very well. Enjoy. This is another great conversation with one of the C++ experts who live in Building 41.

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Terry Crowley: On the History and Evolution of the Internet

Charles — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:19:45 GMT

It is hard to imagine a time when the internet wasn’t a part of our lives. It has been over a decade since the Web transformed the Internet from an academic exercise into a common household name.

Terry Crowley may today be hard at work focusing on the advanced features and capabilities which will be part of Office 14, but he was also deeply involved with the early history and evolution of the early Internet. Join us as he shares with us his reflections of the Internet, the origins and evolution of FrontPage, experiences in Office, and his expectations for where this technology is leading us.

The venerable Robert Hess conducts this interview.

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Read Terry Crowley’s { End Bracket } column in MSDN Magazine

Tandy Trower: Robotics Update

Charles — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:17:04 GMT

We caught up with Tandy Trower recently to find out what's new with in Microsoft Robotics World, now named Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 (got to love our naming schemes, eh?:)). The Robotics group has moved from Redmond to downtown studio. They are still a very small team, but they are now more of an official MS product team as opposed to an incubation group tied to MSR.

Tandy reflects on the current state of MSRDS 2008, robotics in general, RoboChamps competition and more. It's always fun to chat with Tandy, who's been at MS for almost 27 years now. Tandy pioneered Microsoft's foray into robotics and his small team has produced some amazing core technologies (DSS).

Enjoy.

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Dan Reed: On the ManyCore Future and Parallelism in the Sky

Charles — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:42:12 GMT

Dan Reed is Microsoft's Director of Scalable/Multi-Core Systems Research and head of the recently formed Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC): one at the University of California at Berkeley (UC-Berkeley) and a second at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Since we've been here) but part of the same wide-angle general purpose solution to the complex (and arguably fractal) general problem that spans microblips in DRAM to massive data centers.

Certainly the computation Cloud of the future must not only be scalable and highly performant, but also adaptive and homeostatic in how it reacts to frequent perturbation.

What are some of the challenges on the server side with respect to concurrent processing and massive scalability? Clustered server computing environments have traditionally been very good at parallel computation (compared to the general purpose client) so what's Dan and Microsoft working on to ensure our Cloud scales to ManyCore? Is machine learning being incorporated into clustered computing software adaptation and evolution?

Dan has a very interesting biography:

"Previously, I was the founding director of the Renaissiance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina, the Chancellor's Eminent Professor, and Senior Advisor for Strategy and Innovation. Before that, I was head of the Department of Computer Science, Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor, and Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.
I am also a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and chair of the Computing Research Association (CRA)"

Dan was the head of CS at Illinois during the birth of the web browser Mosaic which changed the way people interact with the Internet forever... We talk about where the web is today (including browsers) versus what Mosaic enabled when it arrived.

Enjoy. This is another great discussion with a supercomputing stalwart whose main focus these days is on ensuring we are prepared for the highly parallel future of general purpose computation in the sky.

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Andy Ayers: Understanding the Phoenix Compiler Framework

Charles — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:19:36 GMT

The compiler gurus over in CTP of the Phoenix Compiler Framework. It's been a while since we've learned about Phoenix here on Channel 9 so we thought it necessary to find out what's going on with the soon-to-be de facto compiler technology for all of Microsoft's products.

Andy Ayers is an Architect on the Phoenix team. He sits down with us to dig into the details of Phoenix and address it's current state, history and future (no whiteboarding here, but this is still quite deep. There is a cool demo at the end of the interview.) . It's very interesting to note that the Phoenix team has tested the scalability and power of their pluggable (extensible) compiler framework on the likes of Windows. Turns out Phoenix handles such a large task (compiling Windows) very well. This new compiler technology has been designed with many-core in mind. This means Phoenix is our most parallelized compiler which adds up to shorter compilation time. As usual, the C++ team is ahead of the curve when it comes to preparing for the concurrent future.

Tune in and learn all about the future of Microsoft's compiler technology from one of the minds behind it all. The future is very bright indeed!

Enjoy!

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Mai-lan Tomsen Bukovec: From the Peace Corps to IIS 7

Charles — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:01:47 GMT

Meet group program manager, Mai-lan Tomsen Bukovec, who has been at Microsoft for nine years (Talk about a blast from the past . . . remember Microsoft Transaction Server? Mai-lan was on that team back in the day.). Mai-lan is currently on the Internet Information Services (IIS) team where she manages PMs working on IIS and the Windows Server Hosting System. What does that mean? Well, for starters, she and her team define the features of the core web server, as well as the management tools and administration interfaces plus they work on media server and providing the right tools for the web hosters of the world (like GoDaddy, for example). Phew! That’s a lot. From the Peace Corps to working at a couple of start-ups during the Internet boom when she left Microsoft for a bit, Mai-lan really has a worldwide global perspective. Watch this episode of Low res file here.

Istvan Cseri and Nigel Ellis: SQL Server Data Services Architecture

Charles — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:31:58 GMT

We recently posted Low res file here.