Computing

In this second installment of C9 Conversations, a format where we sit down with various big thinkers to discuss a wide range of big topics related to computing; all in high quality video and audio, the topic is Complexity (ambient complexity, to be precise - it's hard to program systems that are…

Dr. Maria Klawe joined the board of directors of Microsoft in 2009. She is a distinguished computer scientist, scholar and president of Harvey Mudd College. If that's not enough, she's also an accomplished artist. We had to catch up with Maria for WM_IN to learn about her…

Over thousands of years, language has evolved in order to provide mankind a mechanism for making it easier to communicate with one another. Today, the world is filled with a wide variety of languages, some of which are radically different from one another, while others bear striking…

Burton Smith is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft who thinks about ways in which our platform needs to be structured to support general purpose computers that will soon have clustered super computer processing power as we move closer to manycore everywhere (not too far off into the future...).…

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,…

I recently got the chance to sit down with Brian Beckman, physicist, programmer and Channel 9 celebrity, to learn about the history of computing. As you know, Brian is a great teacher. This lesson focuses on the evolution of computing devices and delves into some of the not-so-obvious uses of…

It's been far too long since we've chatted with the great Brian Beckman, an astrophysicist, software architect, and Channel 9 icon. Some of you may know him as the wizard who appears out of thin air whenever the word Monad is said three times in succession. :->A few weeks ago,…

Before a plane flies for the first time, in the sky, it has flown many thousands of virtual miles in distributed clusters of computation cells, calculating non-linear differential equations of fluid dynamics.  Intelligent Light, with its Fortran and Python writing programmers, represents a…

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…

Sometimes, things go wrong when code executes. You can't predict when this will happen or even why, but you can write code to handle exceptional problems. If you're lucky, the problem will carry with it a bunch of useful information that you can use, at runtime, to handle the specific error. These…