Entries for Charles

Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) and Software Security Today

Charles — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:49:00 GMT

The Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) team recently released two new security tools, BinScope Binary Analyzer and MiniFuzz File Fuzzer, to help you write more secure code. Jeremy Dallman, Michael Howard, and Ivan Medvedev created these tools so we decided to pay them a visit to chat about what these tools do and why they matter. Of course, it's been way too long since Michael Howard has preached to us from his security soapbox so we just had to get him talking about the general state of software security today and where it's going!

For the Microsoft SDL team, SDL is as much a lifestyle as it is a software development lifecycle. Developers, thrive securely so that others may securely thrive. Oh yeah, brothers and sisters. I'm sensing the need for a security soapbox show on 9. We need more preaching. There's still far too many developers writing insecure code. "Reverend" Howard, are you game, sir?

Get BinScope and MiniFuzz on SDL Tool Repository. Please use them!!!

Stay updated on the SDL at:

http://www.microsoft.com/sdl

http://blogs.msdn.com/sdl

C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals Chapter 6 of 13

Charles — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:53:00 GMT

Some functions, such as factorial, are simpler to define in terms of other functions. As we shall see, however, many functions can naturally be defined in terms of themselves.

Properties of functions defined using recursion can be proved using the simple but powerful mathematical technique of induction.

You should watch these in sequence (or skip around depending on your curent level of knowledge in this domain):

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5

Now, we do have a textbook and you should go buy it: The great Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. We worked with the publisher, Cambridge University Press, to get all Niners a 20% discount on the book. Now, you don't need the book to learn a great deal from this lecture series since Graham's website has all the slides and samples from the book as well as answers to the exercises. That said, it's highly recommended reading and you should consider it.

The promotion code is 09HASK and it is vaild on both the Hardback:

9780521871723 and Paperback: 9780521692694. The catalog pages are:

Hardback:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521871723 and the paperback is:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521692694

Note: This special offer is valid until December 31, 2009

E2E: Erik Meijer and Burton Smith - Concurrency, Parallelism and Programming

Charles — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:19:00 GMT

The great Burton Smith, Microsoft Technical Fellow and an international leader in high-performance computer architecture and programming languages for parallel computing joins functional programming purist and language design guru Erik Meijer to discuss several major themes of parallel computing and distributed programming. As always, you will get a lesson in history, present trends and future possibilities. This is simply an awesome and deeply wonderful conversation. Burton is a treasure.

Erik shows up for the conversation only after Burton begins to talk about a potential definition for functional programming. Right on queue, Erik arrives!

Burton will be presenting his thinking on parallel and concurrent programming at PDC09. He will also be a panelist on the Future of Programming panel (and Erik will be the panel moderator - you won't want to miss the panel if you are attending PDC!).

C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals Chapter 5 of 13

Charles — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:31:00 GMT

We've kicked off C9 Lectures with a journey into the world of Functional Programming with functional language purist and high priest of the lambda calculus, Dr. Erik Meijer (you can thank Erik for many of the functional constructs that have shown up in languages like C# and VB.NET. When you use LINQ, thank Erik in addition to Anders).

We will release a new chapter in this series every Thursday.

In Chapter 5, Dr. Meijer introduces and digs into List Comprehensions. In mathematics, comprehension notation is used to construct new sets from old sets. In Haskell, you can create new lists from old lists using a similar comprehension syntax:

[x^2 | x <- [1..5]]

The above notation represents the list [1,4,9,16,25] of all numbers x^2 such that x is an element of the list [1..5]. The <- [1..5] syntax is known as a generator and list comprehensions can have mulitple generators that can have explicit dependencies on other generators. You will also learn about guards, which restrict values created by earlier generators.

You should watch these in sequence (or skip around depending on your curent level of knowledge in this domain):

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

Now, we do have a textbook and you should go buy it: The great Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. We worked with the publisher, Cambridge University Press, to get all Niners a 20% discount on the book. Now, you don't need the book to learn a great deal from this lecture series since Graham's website has all the slides and samples from the book as well as answers to the exercises. That said, it's highly recommended reading and you should consider it.

The promotion code is 09HASK and it is vaild on both the Hardback:

9780521871723 and Paperback: 9780521692694. The catalog pages are:

Hardback:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521871723 and the paperback is:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521692694

Note: This special offer is valid until December 31, 2009

E2E: Erik Meijer and Don Box - Perspectives on SOAP, Programming Data and M

Charles — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:52:00 GMT

Don Box is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft and has a rich history in the general purpose programming world. You remember SOAP, right? Don was one of the Gang of Four who designed SOAP. Don was also instrumental in the design and implementation of WCF. Don is currently building a new model-based data programming platform, code-named Oslo, along with a new language for describing data, M.

Erik Meijer, programming language and library designer, chats with Don about the history of SOAP, model-based programming, data and M. Don will be at PDC09 and in addition to giving his usual stellar performance as a session speaker, he will be part of the Future of Programming panel (a view into Microsoft's perspective on trends and possibilities for general purpose programming in the age of many-core and cloud computing).

Dave Thompson: Turning Software into Services [Dave Thompson: Turning Software into Services]

Charles — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:23:00 GMT

Dave Thompson, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Online Services, is an industry veteran with 30 years of experience in IT. In his leadership role for Microsoft Online Services, Dave is responsible for leading the delivery of Microsoft's business software products as online services. Dave has a rich history solving complex problems in computing. He's the guy that put TCP into Windows, back in the day. Today, his focus is squarely on taking Microsoft's business platform to the next level, up to the cloud. What does this all mean, exactly? How complex is it to take traditional software and turn it into a service? What are the big problems that Dave and team face? How does this concentrated focus on services benefit developers and businesses that build their innovations on the Microsoft stack?

Tune in. Meet Dave and get a clear sense of where we are heading as Microsoft continues the evolution of PC and server software. These are exciting times for Microsoft, and We are bringing our partners into this new territory with us. Fascinating times indeed. Keep up the great work Dave and team!

in reply to Dave Thompson: Turning Software into Services

Wolfgang Grieskamp and Keith Stobie: Spec Explorer - An Overview [Wolfgang Grieskamp and Keith Stobie: Spec Explorer - An Overview]

Charles — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:46:00 GMT

Spec Explorer is a visual tool for modeling software behavior and generating test suites from those models. It has just been released on DevLabs.

Here, architects Wolfgang Grieskamp and Keith Stobie join us to discuss the thinking behind Spec Explorer. You can see Spec Explorer in action here. What problems does the model-based approach to testing solve? How is Spec Explorer related to contractual programming (Spec#, .NET Contracts, etc)? What's the holy grail of this approach to advanced and efficient testing? Everything has a rich history and Spec Explorer is no exception. What is the history here? What's next?

Spec Explorer Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/SpecExplorer

in reply to Wolfgang Grieskamp and Keith Stobie: Spec Explorer - An Overview

C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals Chapter 4 of 13

Charles — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:34:00 GMT

We've kicked off C9 Lectures with a journey into the world of Functional Programming with functional language purist and high priest of the lambda calculus, Dr. Erik Meijer (you can thank Erik for many of the functional constructs that have shown up in languages like C# and VB.NET. When you use LINQ, thank Erik in addition to Anders).

We will release a new chapter in this series every Thursday.

In Chapter 4, Dr. Meijer teaches us about the art and practice of defining functions. Functions can be defined using conditional expressions and in Haskell conditional expressions must always have an else clause. Functions can also be defined using guarded equations and pattern matching. You will learn about list patterns and integer patterns. Today is also the day that you will learn about lambda expressions and sections.

You should watch these in sequence (or skip around depending on your curent level of knowledge in this domain):

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3

Now, we do have a textbook and you should go buy it: The great Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. We worked with the publisher, Cambridge University Press, to get all Niners a 20% discount on the book. Now, you don't need the book to learn a great deal from this lecture series since Graham's website has all the slides and samples from the book as well as answers to the exercises. That said, it's highly recommended reading and you should consider it.

The promotion code is 09HASK and it is vaild on both the Hardback:

9780521871723 and Paperback: 9780521692694. The catalog pages are:

Hardback:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521871723 and the paperback is:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521692694

Note: This special offer is valid until December 31, 2009

Mark Russinovich: Inside Windows 7 Redux

Charles — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Windows 7 is here, available to all for purchase and ships today with new PCs! To celebrate this momentous occasion for Windows and Microsoft, Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich joins me in a discussion that extends the great conversation we had last year on Windows 7 internals. In his previous C9 interview, Mark told us about many of the new additions to the Windows kernel which enable Windows 7 (and Windows Server R2) to scale to large numbers of processors. Well, removing the kernel dispatcher lock is not all that the great Arun Kishan did. He also developed a new scheduling mechanism known as Distributed Fair Share Scheduling (DFSS). Mark describes what this is and how it works.

We also discuss NUMA, non-uniform memory access, (and Mark explains NUMA to us while showing a demo or two on a 256 processor machine!)

Moving on to Windows memory management, the domain of the great engineer Landy Wang, Mark discusses the new additions to the Windows Memory Manager and explains why they matter to those of us who spend all of our time and in user mode.

Learn about all of this and much more as Mark digs into the insides of Windows 7, way deep down in the system (the culmative effects of which help to make Windows 7 Microsoft's most reliable, scalable and efficient general purpose operating system to date). As usual, Mark explains very complex mechanisms and concepts in a readily understandable way. This is a very conversational piece and we cover a lot of ground in a relatively short period of time. We also learn exactly why Mark is so passionate about operating systems and what the spark was that set off his passion and curiosity of how things work internally.

Mark will be presenting at PDC09 in the Technical Leaders track and the free Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp. His talks will be very deep and will explore all aspects of the new, improved Windows 7 kernel. I highly recommend that you attend both of these talks if you are going to PDC (you're going, right?!).

Check out the Windows area on 9 for more great Windows 7 content, all rolled up into a nice experience!

Enjoy!

Note: Check out all the 9 Guys Mark has. :) Also, you should subscribe to his incredible blog.

Pat Brenner: Visual Studio 2010 - MFC and Windows 7

Charles — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:54:00 GMT

Microsoft Foundation Classes for C++ (MFC) continue to evolve and will ship with Visual Studio 2010. In fact, you can start playing with the updated and improved MFC right now by downloading the VS 2010 Beta 2.

MFC wraps native Windows APIs in convenient C++ wrapper classes that are defined for many Windows objects and common window controls. Not surprisingly, MFC wraps some of the new capabilities in Windows 7 (and will continue to do so in the future).

Some of the key MFC updates in VS 2010 Beta 2 are:

Improved interaction with Windows Explorer:

Windows7 taskbar interaction with preview
Preview, thumbnail and search filter handlers for file types

Ribbon UI improvements:

Ribbon is now an XML resource in the application
A new designer for the ribbon
Visual manager for Windows7 ribbon style

Restart manager support:

Application restart or crash handled more elegantly
Document auto-save and restore handled completely within MFC (if wanted)

Software Developer and 20 year Microsoft veteran Pat Brenner sits down with us to discuss the new and improved MFC and how it takes advantage of new Windows 7 features in the typically convenient MFC way.

Enjoy!

Rico Mariani: Inside Visual Studio Beta 2 - Performance and Reliability [Rico Mariani: Inside Visual Studio Beta 2 - Performance and Reliability]

Charles — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:48:00 GMT

I caught up with the great Rico Mariani, Visual Studio's Chief Software Architect, after his keynote at a VS partner conference held on the Microsoft campus. He tells us all about the improvements in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. Rico and team have taken the performance and reliability of Visual Studio to new levels in this release. Gone are the days of synchronous assembly and COM component reference look-ups (woo hoo!!!). Gone are the long start up times. Gone are roughly 90% of the performance bottlenecks that slowed down the development experience inside the VS2010 Beta 1 IDE. The Visual Studio development team worked their tails off to improve perf and reliability across the board. Tune in to learn about what they did and what they will do prior to RTM. Truly excellent engineering goes on in building 42. Well done, team!

Rico also discusses his final blog post in his VS history series, a 5,000 word up to the minute historical piece. After watching Tina's great VS documentary series, Rico decided to add his own perspective in a 10 part blog post blitz. Great stuff!

Enjoy.

in reply to Rico Mariani: Inside Visual Studio Beta 2 - Performance and Reliability

Visualizing Concurrency: VS 2010 Beta 2 - Parallel Performance Profiling Advancements

Charles — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:21:00 GMT

In Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, you were introduced to new analysis and profiling capabilities (Parallel Profiling and Performance Tools) designed to make concurrency understandable and, ultimately, debuggable. Today, with the release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, we introduce an updated and significantly more capable concurrency visualization and profiling tool which is available with other profiling features in Visual Studio 2010 Premium and Ultimate. What does it do, exactly? How does it work?
What's new?

Here, Architect Hazim Shafi, Dev Lead Sasha Dadiomov and PM Bill Colburn tell us all about the Concurrency Visualizer Profiling Tool, including a demo. So, fire up Beta 2, spin up some threads and visualize concurrency. You should profile an already-existing application that employs concurrency and, perhaps for the first time, get to see what your concurrent code is actually doing at run time.

Parallel visualization tools team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/visualizeparallel/

The parallel computing dev center: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/concurrency/default.aspx

Hazim's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/hshafi/default.aspx

Stephan T. Lavavej: Everything you ever wanted to know about nullptr

Charles — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:39:00 GMT

In C++, 0 is an abused integer. It is used to reflect, well, 0 as a value of type int and it is also used to represent a null pointer... The latter has led to many bugs and confusion over the past 30 years. Put simply, using 0 is and has always been a bad idea (then there's the NULL macro...). Well, my friends, today, with the release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and the updated C++ language, compilers and libraries that come with it, the abuse of 0 comes to an end: Introducing nullptr the rvalue constant that actually is a null pointer literal.

Who better to dig deep into nullptr (and a few other topics of related interest and importance) than the great and gifted Stephan T. Lavavej? Stephen is a C++ expert and library author who you've met before a few times on C9. Sit back, relax and learn everything you ever wanted to know about nullptr. Thank you, Stephen, for the awesome lesson!

Enjoy!

VC Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/default.aspx

C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 3 of 13

Charles — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:46:00 GMT

We've kicked off C9 Lectures with a journey into the world of Functional Programming with functional language purist and high priest of the lambda calculus, Dr. Erik Meijer (you can thank Erik for many of the functional constructs that have shown up in languages like C# and VB.NET. When you use LINQ, thank Erik in addition to Anders).

We will release a new chapter in this series every Thursday.

In Chapter 3, Dr. Meijer explores types and classes in Haskell. A type is a collection of related values and in Haskell every well-formed expression has a type. Using type inference, these types are automatically calculated at run time. If expression e returns a type t, then e is of type t, e :: t. A function is a mapping of one type to another type and you will learn about new types of functions in this lecture, specifically curried functions: functions that return functions as a result (and functions are values, remember) and polymorphic functions (function with a type that contains one or more type variables).

You should watch these in sequence (or skip around depending on your curent level of knowledge in this domain):

Chapter 1
Chapter 2

Now, we do have a textbook and you should go buy it: The great Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. We worked with the publisher, Cambridge University Press, to get all Niners a 20% discount on the book. Now, you don't need the book to learn a great deal from this lecture series since Graham's website has all the slides and samples from the book as well as answers to the exercises. That said, it's highly recommended reading and you should consider it.

The promotion code is 09HASK and it is vaild on both the Hardback:

9780521871723 and Paperback: 9780521692694. The catalog pages are:

Hardback:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521871723 and the paperback is:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521692694

Note: This special offer is valid until December 31, 2009

Immo Landwerth: Future Directions of Native Image Generation via NGen

Charles — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:42:00 GMT

Immo Landwerth is a self-confessed Niner who spends a fair amount of time lurking on C9 and watching videos. In fact, he decided to apply for an internship at Microsoft this past Summer because of the videos on C9. Wow. That's cool!

Immo is from Germany where he is working on his Masters degree in computer science. What better team to intern with than the CLR team? What better problem to spend the summer investigating than how to make the Native Image Generator (Ngen) a more granular "service" and without requiring admin rights to create native images?

Imagine a world where NGen would run when it needed to (in addition to what it does today as part of an application installation process), automatically, and target specific and isolated pieces of the application(binaries that require re-Ngen'ing). Make sense? No? Well, Immo is a very articulate young man, so let him explain it to you. Great thinking, Immo. Looking forward to watching what happens here as NGen evolves.

Good luck, Immo! Hopefully, we'll see you soon when you come to work full time on the CLR team! :)

Introducing Microsoft Office Starter 2010 [Introducing Microsoft Office Starter 2010]

Charles — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:02:00 GMT

Microsoft introduces Office Starter 2010, which includes Word Starter 2010 and Excel 2010. Brian Albrecht and Scott Kahler tell us more about these basic, ad-supported versions of our most popular productivity applications. Note that this is essentially a commercial for the new technology in Office 2010. We will go deeper in the future and in a more conversational manner. Please do ask questions here and on the Office 2010 engineering blog, where you can much more about this great addition to Office.

in reply to Introducing Microsoft Office Starter 2010

Introducing Click-to-Run in Office 2010 [Introducing Click-to-Run in Office 2010]

Charles — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:00:00 GMT

John Jendrezak and Trevor McDiarmid give us a first look at Click-to-Run, an innovative new Electronic Software Distribution (ESD) technology for Office 2010 that utilizes Microsoft’s streaming and virtualization technology (AppVirt - you learned a great deal about this technology right here on Channel 9...). It's great to see application virtualization in the mainstream. Note that this is essentially a commercial for the new technology in Office 2010. We will go deeper in the future and in a more conversational manner. Please do ask questions here and on the Office 2010 engineering blog, where you can much more about this great addition to Office.

in reply to Introducing Click-to-Run in Office 2010

C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 2 of 13

Charles — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:33:00 GMT

We've kicked off C9 Lectures with a journey into the world of Functional Programming with functional language purist and high priest of the lambda calculus, Dr. Erik Meijer (you can thank Erik for many of the functional constructs that have shown up in languages like C# and VB.NET. When you use LINQ, thank Erik in addition to Anders).

We will release a new chapter in this series every Thursday.

In Chapter 2, Dr. Meijer introduces Haskell syntax and notation (via a Haskell implementation called Hugs, to be precise, which is based on Haskell 98) and we learn about the Haskell syntax that represents the fundamental construct of functional programming: functions. It's not like you're used to in mathematics like f(x). Instead, in Haskell, a function is denoted without parentheses: f x. So, given the almost OCD requirement by Haskell language designers to eliminate any unnecessary clutter in the language, parentheses are replaced by space. Also, in mathematics, you're accustomed to multiplication expressed either as xy or x y. In Haskell, since space denotes a function, multiplication is denoted with a *, like x*y...

You should watch these in sequence (or skip around depending on your curent level of knowledge in this domain):

Chapter 1

Now, we do have a textbook and you should go buy it: The great Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. We worked with the publisher, Cambridge University Press, to get all Niners a 20% discount on the book. Now, you don't need the book to learn a great deal from this lecture series since Graham's website has all the slides and samples from the book as well as answers to the exercises. That said, it's highly recommended reading and you should consider it.

The promotion code is 09HASK and it is vaild on both the Hardback:

9780521871723 and Paperback: 9780521692694. The catalog pages are:

Hardback:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521871723 and the paperback is:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521692694

Note: This special offer is valid until December 31, 2009

Niners on 9: Sven Groot - Past, Present and Future

Charles — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:25:00 GMT

Sven Groot is a long time Niner and one of the more active contributors to the C9 forums (you'll note that Sven answers technical questions when he can and has always been respectful in the way he interacts with his fellow Niners). Sven is also a PhD student at Tokyo University where he is working on and thinking about large scale distributed clustered computing (now we know why he was so keen on my producing a Dryad piece for Going Deep - Sven is a clever guy...).

Sven was in town recently on vacation in Seattle (why not Maui or one of the Tahitian islands, man?), so we had to interview him. Also, I brought Sven to a randomly generated team meeting of one of the most innovative teams at Microsoft (and filmed it). So you will see more of Sven and learn more about some very interesting technologies, but here we learn all about Sven, the man, the legend.

We cover a lot in this impromptu conversation and Sven has many interesting things to say about cloudy computation and the future of distributed computation somewhere up there. It's great to have you as a vocal member of Channel 9, Sven. Thank you for the feedback on C9 (some of which is shared in this conversation) and for being helpful to your fellow Niners. See, Niners, when you come to Seattle, you never know if you will sit down in front of a camera, rolling 9.

Enjoy and thank you again, Sven!

Expert to Expert: Rich Hickey and Brian Beckman - Inside Clojure

Charles — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:29:00 GMT

Clojure is a dynamic programming language created by Rich Hickey that targets both the Java Virtual Machine and the CLR. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection.

Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language, and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system that ensure clean, correct, multithreaded designs.

Astrophysicist and Software Architect Brian Beckman interviews Rich Hickey to dig into the details of this very interesting language. If you don't know much about Clojure and the general problems it aims to solve, well, watch and listen carefully to this great conversation with plenty of whiteboarding and outstanding questions. Expert to Expert simply rocks! Thank you for spending time with us, Rich! Clojure is great!

Audio Problems: Please Test Fix (Thanks, Duncan!!) [Audio Problems: Please Test Fix (Thanks, Duncan!!)]

Charles — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:26:19 GMT

Hi,

Many of you have been reporting audio issues with our videos (streaming into the SL player). With the help of Niners and the data they've provided to us (thank you!!!) we have isolated this problem to XPSP3 with Silverlight 3. Also, it looks like it's a bug in our encoding process, which Duncan has indentified and fixed. Now, we need your help testing his fix.

If you are running XP with SL3 please test this C9 post and let us know if you hear sound :)

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Duncanma/Testing-the-Audio-issue-with-XP/

Thank you, Duncan!!!!
C

in reply to Audio Problems: Please Test Fix (Thanks, Duncan!!)

C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 1 of 13

Charles — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:50:00 GMT

Welcome to a new technical series on Channel 9 folded into a different kind of 9 format: C9 Lectures. These are what you think they are, lectures. They are not conversational in nature (like most of what you're used to on 9), but rather these pieces are entirely focused on education, coming to you in the form of a series of high quality technical lectures (1 or more per topic) on a single topic.

We kick off C9 Lectures with a journey into the world of Functional Programming with functional language purist and high priest of the lambda calculus, Dr. Erik Meijer (you can thank Erik for many of the functional constructs that have shown up in languages like C# and VB.NET. When you use LINQ, thank Erik in addition to Anders).

Lecture Context:

Over the past two years, you've learned a fair amount about the functional programming paradigm's foray into general purpose imperative progamming languages (LINQ, Lambda's, etc in C# and VB.NET). And, of course, the newest language to join the Visual Studio family of languages, F#, is a functional language. You've heard us say how important functional language constructs are to the our current languages' capabilities to evolve in the right direction to meet the needs of the many-core future (the need for reliable and comprehensible concurrency, parallelism, etc) and, most importantly, to help vault computer programming into an age of compositionality (remember our talks on 9 regarding composability and evolution of software engineering as an engineering discipline?). Well, we decided to take a step back and teach you the fundamentals of functional programming at a level equivalent to any university. We even have a text book and professor who will expand our minds.

Dr. Erik Meijer will teach us Functional Programming Fundamentals using Haskell as the language for understanding the basic functional principles (in fact, the specific language isn't all that important, but Haskell is a pure functional language so it is entirely appropriate for learning the essential ingredients of functional programming. It is also a relatively small language and should be easy for you to get up to speed with Haskell once you understand the Why, What and How that underlies all functional languages...).

Now, we do have a textbook and you should go buy it: The great Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. We worked with the publisher, Cambridge University Press, to get all Niners a 20% discount on the book. Now, you don't need the book to learn a great deal from this lecture series since Graham's website has all the slides and samples from the book as well as answers to the exercises. That said, it's highly recommended reading and you should consider it.

The promotion code is 09HASK and it is vaild on both the Hardback and Paperback.

Hardback:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521871723

Paperback:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521692694

Note: This special offer is valid until December 31, 2009

In Chapter 1, Dr. Meijer takes us through the fundamental fundamentals of functional programming: The philosophy and history of functional programming. As you can imagine, these lectures will go deeper and deeper as the chapters progress, but you need to understand the philosophical and historical contexts. This will provide a nice layer of fresh conceptual soil in which to plant the seeds of understanding the technical details of functional programming, of functional reasoning.

Welcome to C9 Lectures. Enjoy and learn, learn, learn.

ALWAYS ask questions right here. Erik will answer them. Remember, he is professor Erik Meijer in this context and professors answer the questions of their students. Thank you, Erik, for doing this!

Welcome to C9 Lectures!

E2E: Erik Meijer and Wes Dyer - Reactive Framework (Rx) Under the Hood 2 of 2

Charles — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:50:00 GMT

Software Developer extraordinaire and language compiler geek Wes Dyer and programming language design guru and LINQ co-creator Erik Meijer dig into the Reactive Framework (Rx). This is part 2 of 2. See part 1 here.

Here, Erik and Wes continue their discussion on the core ideas behind Rx. Rx is deep (as in profound), as you must have gathered by now. Erik, of course, continues to keep the theoretical basis of all this squarely front and center so we understand the relationship between principles and practice.

Enjoy!

E2E: Erik Meijer and Wes Dyer - Reactive Framework (Rx) Under the Hood 1 of 2

Charles — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:47:00 GMT

You've already learned a great deal about Erik Meijer's latest programming creation, Rx, right here on Channel 9 (here and here, to be precise).

Well, wouldn't it be great to get the two key minds behind Rx in one place with one whiteboard? Yes, of course it would! Enter Software Developer extraordinaire and language compiler geek Wes Dyer and programming language design guru and LINQ co-creator Erik Meijer to dig into the "Live Labs Reactive Framework (Rx)" or ".NET Reactive Framework (Rx)". So, let's be honest here. The official name of this great technology has not been determined. But, it's just a name and the name is so much less interesting than what this technology enables and will enable in the future for software developers. So, forget about the exact branding of Rx. Just think of it as, well, Rx until the marketing people come up with an official naming scheme (that most likely will not be as cool as Rx, but c'est la vie...).

Here, Erik and Wes focus on the core ideas behind Rx and dig into the geeky details of this observer-based programming model. Rx is deep (as in profound), as you must have gathered by now. Erik, of course, keeps the theoretical basis of all this squarely front and center so we understand the relationship between principles and practice.

Enjoy!

Let's throw a Windows 7 launch "party" - The Channel 9 Way [Let's throw a Windows 7 launch "party" - The Channel 9 Way]

Charles — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:12:55 GMT

Yeah, I must admit that I find this whole Windows 7 House Party thing strange (if not a little corny), but it seems as though people are really getting into it (and this is true globally...). So, right on to the Windows Marketing folks. Of course, this is Channel 9 and we don't work for Windows Marketing :) We had an idea for a Channel 9 party of sorts where Niner nation takes part in a virtual party which manifests itself in creative, funny, clean (no foul language or... you understand) short videos that you send to us. Here's the basic idea:

We want you to send us a short video (20 seconds max) of yourself (in your favorite party atmosphere) explaining why you like Windows 7 (or don't like it, but then that's kind of a downer unless you like frustration or unhappy parties - which is your prerogative). The Channel 9 team will be creating a few skits ourselves and then we’ll compile the best videos and air them as one big Channel 9 house party. Be creative, be funny, be serious, just be you. Also for extra incentive - we will randomly select one video from your submissions and send you a copy of Windows 7 signed by Steve Ballmer. Make sure your audio and lighting are decent and send your submissions to