Behind The Code

This episode features Jim Gray. He is a "Technical Fellow" in the Scaleable Servers Research Group (Sky Server, Terra Server) and manager of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (BARC). Jim has been called a "giant" in the fields of database and transaction processing…

When thinking about businesses, large or small, it can be easy to lose sight of the individual. For the individuals within those companies, it can be difficult to see the role they play in the big picture and how their personal journey might fit in. For individuals outside those companies, also…

Where do objects go when they aren't used anymore (and how to know that they are no longer useful to the executing code that created them)? Might seem like a silly question to most developers, but that's what Technical Fellow Patrick Dussud has been dealing with for most of his career.…

Artists embody a diverse set of talents and interests. This gives them a rich array of experiences to draw upon in their work. In the same way, Richard Ward brings an eclectic background and collection of interests to his efforts at Microsoft.  He brings this diversity to his own art of…

What do global warming, a scientific instrument weighing about 4500 tons and bill collection have in common? The once Berkeley ‘hippie chick’ turned Software Architect Catharine van Ingen. Catharine has a wealth of experience in hardware, including work with the Alpha machine and MIPS processor…

For eighteen years at Microsoft, Rico Mariani’s contagious enthusiasm for technology has inspired countless others to write better and faster code. Most people inside Microsoft know this software architect from his frequent postings on the internal performance tuning alias, and other people  know…

In the often male dominated world of computers, Rebecca Norlander has made a name for herself by taking on big challenges, and proving she has what it takes to deliver results.  Join us to learn how Rebecca got her start at Microsoft, advancing through roles where she had tremendous impact…

From something as simple as a paperclip to far more complex machines such as computers, there are a wide variety of machines forming a regular part of our daily lives. None, however, come close to the complexity found in the machine that is the human being.When you think of Microsoft, you might…

Microsoft is well known for Windows, Office, .NET, Xbox, Zune and a long list of other products and technologies.   Less discussed however, is a group at Microsoft that isn’t necessarily focused on ship dates, packaging, or competing products. Instead they think about how computers and…

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…