androidi

• Coming Soon: Visual Studio Achievements

  Nov 23, 2011 at 12:36 PM

  The concept reminds me of those annoying "You've earned a badge! Yippee!" popups at khanacademy. But I think they went away since I've not seen them recently.

• Drawbridge: A new form of virtualization for application sandboxing

  Oct 17, 2011 at 1:02 PM

  Interesting interview but would have been nice to have a little deeper questions:

  If app consists of multiple sequential or parallel executables, so that eg. excel.exe starts excel2.exe and then excel.exe terminates and excel2 starts multiple different exes with their own windows and excel2.exe terminates... will this kind of thing work with this model? What if there's also some LPC or shared memory IPC between these before the termination?

  If app uses CreateFile to open \\.\C: (hope i got that right) or a PhysicalDisk and in order to run needs to be able to write and read somewhere on the disk without going through the filesystem apis, will your security layer virtualize this or will the app fail to run?

  How do you "install" app onto this sandbox? Lot of talk about lack of 3D/HW support but would have been many more interesting questions about how to handle things related to what eg. game installers do, such as "sony rootkit drm", would that rootkit drm game install fine even if it was just 2D non-accelerated game. Also, would this approach work to enable better compatibility with Windows 3 & 95/98 apps/games using old DX apis?

  Getting old windows games and apps to run is oft more pain than dos games in dosbox. If MS were to productize this research, it could end up like the current app compat layer, which can require a bunch (too much) of fiddling just to find the app you want to run is not going to run since even if you put compat mode "XP", the broken stuff tends to stay broken unless it was specifically tested by people in MS.

  I think this type of legacy compatibility thing may be better using a hybrid development model: paid core team developing the long term goal deliveries and then allow the community using the product develop their own minor fixes and improvements that could be easily patched (by users, so simply that no instructions are needed) into the product on need basis. eg. if I as user run appX, it will check for community made fixes for appX and allow me to install those in the sandboxing layer or something, ensuring longevity and broadening compatibility as time goes on even if MS stops active development on the sandbox. Just a thought...

• Channel 9 has gone global!

  Oct 04, 2011 at 7:37 AM

  It says I'm using the physically nearest center however the site still takes its time to load. I suspect it has to do with me using Live to authenticate here.

• Capturing and analyzing performance traces

  Sep 14, 2011 at 4:49 AM

  Does ETL recording still wake up all sleeping hard drives when capture is stopped - very annoying issue in Windows 7 that affects all tools using event tracing? I don't know if the root cause is related for same happening when VS 2010 is startup with Customer Experience Improvement enabled but that could be.

  I'll be doing some tests when I get Windows 8 installed to see if the captures now finally correlate to spikes in DPC latency checker which from user perspective correlates to actual glitches in application performance more so than what I've managed to capture with xperf.

• C++ and Beyond 2011: Herb Sutter - Why C++?

  Sep 12, 2011 at 2:19 AM

  @MrEd: Well put (and you didn't even mention optical/photonic computing).

  Even with the new features in C++, it still needs more productivity features, and even when it would have them, they're still all very language centric and IDE features built around that turn out to break easily or be difficult to build/test etc and runtime cost of IDE/analysis features can be higher than with simpler languages.

  I thought about if it would be possible to have the full C++ compiler considered as the "HTML4" and then have a "strict"-like subset of the full language and libraries used either solely or alongside in the a project but there's a lot of compromises and hard questions there and seems like high risk vs reward.

  Besides Yet Another Language some other ideas could be (from the perspective of "I want to use C# but have the perf of C++ where needed") : take the C# compiler and make it spit out C++, or add a /native switch that turns C# into native code and allows free native interop so instead of making C++ slow with C++/CLI, give C# programs ability to do perf critical parts in native code with zero interop penalty and make the transitions completely static so in the compiled release binary it's seamless where the C# ends and C/C++ begins.

   

• GoingNative 1: VC++ vNext, CRT, C++ and Beyond

  Aug 25, 2011 at 11:47 AM

  One trivial(?) thing that springs to mind when CRT is mentioned. I often find myself inside it when doing something with a native project and then there's a ton of those CRT etc files open. As a C# dude I'm used to quickly press Step In to traverse through a code I'm trying to understand. With native code I end up in CRT code or somewhere immediately with two presses of F11.

  Why doesn't C++ have "Just my code" so I can Step In through my code quickly without actually ending up inside CRT or other MS code? (Maybe Shift-F11 or something to step inside if you really want to, without having to go into options to change the setting!)

   

  With the same effort that goes to recognizing what is a CRT function (to avoid stepping in), those could be maybe optionally shown in different shade of color to tell when you can press "shift-f11" to step in.

   

• Silverlight TV 80: Reactive Extensions

  Aug 04, 2011 at 10:44 AM

  The video mentioned at the end

  http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX11/EXT08

• Talkin' C++ with Boris Jabes: C++ Intellisense, Game Development, and Boris Faces His Demons

  Mar 30, 2011 at 5:20 AM

  I don't think there's a need for some kind of wizard that generates a game based on existing genre. Well unless that genre is Elite-style games with seamless surface to space transition that also allows to walk on planet surfaces and project the world in both 3d and pseudo-2d. That kind of thing could cover all current game genres just by changing the camera view/projection.

  Maybe MS could license this:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Novae_(game_engine)

  so that all Visual Studios would come with a wizard to create game based on that? It uses C# as scripting language which is cool.

   

  (Then again it's a good question whether it's better to have less of Elite-style games than more, since ideally you'd have lot of resources spent into building a handful of those well and avoid fragmentation of the potential player population into multiple similar games since there's not enough players to populate even single Elite style MMO very well unless the ability to travel in the galaxy is either limited or the players are encouraged to stay within close proximity)

• Ben the PC Guy & Ryan Asdourian show off the Spring's hottest PCs

  Mar 03, 2011 at 5:57 AM

  By not showing the display powered we can make an educated guess that they all have a TN panel with any two or three of: horrible contrast/colors/viewing angles.

   

  Ipad 2 has IPS display and it cost $499, so that clearly shows that it's not that there can't be laptops with decent displays, it's simply that PC OEMs were too greedy and got stuck with TN, now that no one of them uses IPS the plants aren't there to do those in volume and any switch from TN would cost a fortune thus being uneconomical, the eventual end result is that everyone will move to Apple because in a personal computer hardware there are 2 things that rule: the display quality and the input method quality.

   

   

   

   

• Ben and Ryan Explain: Hard Drives vs. Solid-State Drives

  Mar 03, 2011 at 5:16 AM

  Is this Channel 9? Lets see something actually useful:

   

  - IDE startup times

  - compiling something of decent size like DosBox with full optimization

  - boot & resume/unpause of vmware snapshot containining windows 7 as guest OS. (say 2 GB of memory for the guest OS)

   

  And how is the read & write latency if the SSD gets completely full with uncompressable data for a moment before user deletes stuff? I've heard the SSD perf can actually drop to lower than spinning HDD perf both latency (temporarily) and sequential perf wise (even permanently).

   

  There's a reason I haven't got into the SSD bandwagon yet, waiting for them to be actually ready for serious use, those Vertex 3 released this year just might be the first SSD that are usable.

   

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