Today's most widely used technology, by far, for static program verification is the ubiquitous type checker. Alas, static type systems inevitably exclude some good programs; and allow some bad ones.  Thus motivated, Simon describes some fun he has been having with Haskell, by making the type system more expressive without losing the benefits of automatic proof and compact expression.

About Simon Peyton Jones

Simon Peyton Jones, MA, MBCS, CEng, graduated from Trinity College Cambridge in 1980. After two years in industry, he spent seven years as a lecturer at University College London, and nine years as a professor at Glasgow University, before moving to Microsoft Research (Cambridge) in 1998.

His main research interest is in functional programming languages, their implementation, and their application. He has led a succession of research projects focused around the design and implementation of production-quality functional-language systems for both uniprocessors and parallel machines. He was a key contributor to the design of the now-standard functional language Haskell, and is the lead designer of the widely-used Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He has written two textbooks about the implementation of functional languages.

More generally, he is interested in language design, rich type systems, software component architectures, compiler technology, code generation, runtime systems, virtual machines, and garbage collection. He is particularly motivated by direct use of principled theory to practical language design and implementation -- that's one reason he loves functional programming so much. His home page is at

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj

Haskell is now quite widely used, but its most important contributions are the ideas that it embodies. In this talk Simon focuses on one of these ideas, namely type classes, with a few anecdotes and reflections along the way about the process of developing the language.

Type classes are probably Haskell's most distinctive feature. The original idea is very neat and, better still, it led to a long series of subsequent generalizations and innovations. Indeed, although the language is now nineteen years old, Haskell's type system is still in a state of furious development. For example, Simon is involved in adding type-level functions to Haskell, as he briefly describes. 

Simon explains what type classes are, how they differ from the classes of mainstream object oriented languages, why he thinks they are so cool, and what the hot topics are. 

About Simon Peyton Jones

Simon Peyton Jones, MA, MBCS, CEng, graduated from Trinity College Cambridge in 1980. After two years in industry, he spent seven years as a lecturer at University College London, and nine years as a professor at Glasgow University, before moving to Microsoft Research (Cambridge) in 1998.

His main research interest is in functional programming languages, their implementation, and their application. He has led a succession of research projects focused around the design and implementation of production-quality functional-language systems for both uniprocessors and parallel machines. He was a key contributor to the design of the now-standard functional language Haskell, and is the lead designer of the widely-used Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He has written two textbooks about the implementation of functional languages.

More generally, he is interested in language design, rich type systems, software component architectures, compiler technology, code generation, runtime systems, virtual machines, and garbage collection. He is particularly motivated by direct use of principled theory to practical language design and implementation -- that's one reason he loves functional programming so much.
His home page is at

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj

What do you do, when your .NET application crashes on the production servers and you can't reproduce the bug in-house? How do you detect memory leaks in a .NET application, when you can't inspect the memory usage from Visual Studio? In this demo-intensive presentation we take a look at how WinDbg and SOS can be used to troubleshoot several hard-to-debug, real world problems in .NET applications.

About Brian Rasmussen
Brian Rasmussen is a chief software engineer at SimCorp in Copenhagen and a Microsoft MVP for C#. He spends most of his time working on developer tools, proof of concept projects and advanced debugging of .NET code.
Brian is a frequent speaker at conferences and events, and an active member of the Danish .NET community. He frequently blogs about C#, the .NET Common Language Runtime and low-level debugging of managed code at http://kodehoved.dk 

What do you do, when your .NET application crashes on the production servers and you can't reproduce the bug in-house? How do you detect memory leaks in a .NET application, when you can't inspect the memory usage from Visual Studio? In this demo-intensive presentation we take a look at how WinDbg and SOS can be used to troubleshoot several hard-to-debug, real world problems in .NET applications.

About Brian Rasmussen
Brian Rasmussen is a chief software engineer at SimCorp in Copenhagen and a Microsoft MVP for C#. He spends most of his time working on developer tools, proof of concept projects and advanced debugging of .NET code.
Brian is a frequent speaker at conferences and events, and an active member of the Danish .NET community. He frequently blogs about C#, the .NET Common Language Runtime and low-level debugging of managed code at http://kodehoved.dk

About Ian Robinson
Ian Robinson is a Principal Consultant with ThoughtWorks, where he specializes in the design and delivery of service-oriented and distributed systems. He has written guidance for Microsoft on implementing integration patterns with Microsoft technologies, and has published articles on business-oriented development methodologies and distributed systems design - most recently in The ThoughtWorks Anthology (Pragmatic Programmers, 2008).

But beyond the name, what is this new thing? As far as I can see, the answer depends on who you ask. Ask enough people, and you will see that it can mean anything - which means, by the way, that it might mean nothing. I don’t view it that way. Yes, there are a lot of diverse views. But that also means that there is a lot of diverse conversations accompanying them, and I see that as healthy. Complacency is rarely a worthy aspiration for design. But out of the collective conversations one would hope that there is some convergence - which might be another term for insight or growth.

The purpose of this talk is to throw my own thoughts into the fray - for better or for worse. Taking my cue from the term itself, I’ll start like a good naturalist, and strip the term bare, and build from there. Starting with diving into the essence of the term natural.

Biography: Bill Buxton is the author of "Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design", published jointly by Morgan Kaufmann and Focal Press as well as a columnist on design and innovation for BusinessWeek.com. He is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and has a 30 year involvement in research, design and commentary around human aspects of technology, and digital tools for creative endeavour, including music, film and industrial design. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was a researcher at Xerox PARC, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Chief Scientist of Alias Research and SGI Inc. - where 2003 he was co-recipient of an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement. In 2007, he was named Doctor of Design, honoris causa, by the Ontario College of Art and Design, in 2008 became the 10th reci-pient of the ACM/SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award for fundamental contributions to the field of human-computer interaction. In January 2009 was elected a Fellow of the ACM, in June was awarded a Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, by his alma mater, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, and in November was awarded an honourary doctorate in Industrial Design from the Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Finally, in 2010, BusinessWeek named Bill among the World's Most Influential Designers.

With Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft is shipping a broad set of technologies to support programmers in their quest of taking full advantage of the emerging parallel hardware. In this talk, I will present these technologies and give an overview of the kinds of algorithms targeted. Supporting both native-code development in C++ and managed-code development in C#, Visual Basic and F#, the new libraries and language features have a lot to offer the parallel programmer.