Microsoft Personalities

Functional programming is increasing in popularity these days given the inherent problems with shared mutable state that is rife in the imperative world. As we march on to a world of multi and many-core chipsets, software engineering must evolve to better equip software engineers with the tools to…

Brian Beckman and Erik Meijer are back with another episode of BMO! In this installment, Brian and Erik spend some time explaining the Lambda Calculus and most of the time digging into a real world application of general term rewriting. The Lambda Calculus is a specialized…

During an interview for a technical position at Microsoft your interviewer might turn to you and ask you to write some code, or work out a problem on the whiteboard. Here's a mock whiteboard session to see what an interviewer looks for during that stage of the interview. This is a question…

Ever find yourself wondering about the math behind your favorite simulation game? Did you know that the motion physics of a car are much more complicated than the those of an airplane? Brian Beckman, physicist, programmer and Channel 9 celebrity (he's been on C9 a few times...), sure does.…

Robert Fripp was on the Microsoft campus a few weeks back. He's the famous guitarist and composer, known for his founding role in the band King Crimson. Charles Torre (a big King Crimson fan) was invited over by Steve Ball to film the session.So, what was he doing on campus? Recording the…

Alice wanders down a rabbit hole one day and finds Erik Meijer and Brian Beckman in the C9 studio. What's going to happen? What does she find? There's a plastic mouse, a hard drive, a hammer, database acid, a whiteboard and a couple geniuses in very rare form. Erikand Brian…

It's hard to write kernel mode drivers. Real hard. In fact, it's hard to believe how hard it is. Well, the Windows Driver People have been working tirelessly to make it a little less hard (not easy) to write kernel mode drivers that won't hose your system. You know, blue screen of death and the…

If you write code on Windows or like to know what goes on under the hood in Windows, then you've no doubt heard of Mark Russinovich. He's an OS kernel expert and a co-founder of Winternals; a company that produced must-have operating system and development utilities for Windows (Winternals is…

Brian Beckman is a fascinating individual. Ex-cosmologist, ex-military operating system and simulation developer (have you ever considered processes that move both forward and backward in time? Well, Brian and team at JPL created just that. He explains in this interview...). Brian was one of…

Stephan T. Lavavej is a Channel 9 hero. You've learned a great deal from him over the years, but you've not really learned much about him. How did STL—that's what we call him since, well, look at his name and what he does for a living—get to where he is today? What's his story? Of course, given…