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,…

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…

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…

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.…

I recently attended Lang.NET 2008 and, as expected, learned a great deal from some of the industry's finest language and compiler minds.Here, we meet Dan Ingalls and Allen Wirfs-Brock, two legendary Smalltalkers (contributors to the language). Dan Ingalls is well known for his work at Xerox PARC and…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…