Computing

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,…

Software Architect and Astrophysicist Brian Beckman has a new job at Microsoft. No longer working with Erik Meijer on cutting edge developer tools and programming languages, Brian has joined a very small team of distinguished engineers and technical fellows that seeks to create a new product for…

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...).…

I attended Lang.NET 2008 and, as expected, learned a great deal from some of the industry's finest language and compiler minds. One of the most interesting talks was Gilad Bracha's session on his new programming language, Newspeak. Newspeak is really compelling from a language design perspective…

You've seen a few conversations on Channel 9 about Microsoft's Entity Framework. Well, it's time for another one, but with a new twist...Brian Beckman recently had a deep technical chat with Sam Druker about the Entity Framework data model and related technologies. Sam is GM of…

Microsoft is developing a number of technologies to simplify the expression of parallelism in code. An example of this work is Parallel Extensions for the .NET Framework (PFX), a managed programming model for data parallelism, task parallelism, scheduling, and coordination on parallel hardware.…

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…

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…

Meet Dr. Margaret Burnett, a Professor of Computer Science at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. She is exploring hypotheses correlating and differentiating (or unifying) both the design and usage patterns of software by…

Meet Xin Wang, SciFi fan and an expert in artificial intelligence (she has a Ph.D in it!).  Today she works on Markov decision problems and how to use approximate optimization problems that can be traced all the way back to Sir Issac Newton to solve combinatorial optimization problems. Xin…