MS Research

Computer Scientists and MSR Researchers Wolfram Schulte, Herman Venter, Nikolai Tillmann, and Manuel Fahndrich join Erik Meijer for an Expert to Expert deep dive into the theory and implementation strategies inside of SPUR, a research Tracing…

A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable. -Leslie Lamport. Leslie Lamport is a computer scientist and mathematician best known for his work with distributed systems. In fact, Dr. Lamport’s research…

JavaScript is the most widely used programming language on the web. As the great Douglas Crockford likes to say, JavaScript is both the world's most popular programming language and the world's least popular programming language at the same time.In this episode of Expert to Expert (to Expert),…

Microsoft Research was in the news not too long ago regarding the innovative, outside-the-box research being done by MSR scientists on display at the annual MSR TechFest event. One of the stars of the show was a new web browser project named Gazelle. Gazelle is a Microsoft Research…

"Concurrent Basic extends Visual Basic with stylish asynchronous concurrency constructs derived from the join calculus. Our design advances earlier MSRC work on Polyphonic C#, Comega and the Joins Library. Unlike its C# based predecessors, CB adopts a simple event-like syntax…

CHESS is an automated tool from Microsoft Research for finding errors in multithreaded software by systematic exploration of thread schedules. It finds errors, such as data-races, deadlocks, hangs, and data-corruption induced access violations, that are extremely hard to find with…

The Spec# programming system is a new attempt at a more cost effective way to develop and maintain high-quality software.  Spec# is pronounced "Spec sharp" and can be written (and searched for) as the "specsharp" or "Spec# programming system".  The Spec#…

Dan Reed is Microsoft's Director of Scalable/Multi-Core Systems Research and head of the recently formed Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC): one at the University of California at Berkeley (UC-Berkeley) and a second at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).…

Bertrand Meyer is a programming language guru, computer scientist and arguably the uncle of object oriented programming . Bertrand created the Eiffel programming language. Eiffel is an object-oriented language that is based on a fixed set of powerful principles like Design by Contract and…

A few months ago, I interviewed Byron Cook, a researcher at MSR Cambridge, about his work on Terminator, which is a proof-based analysis tool used for proving that good things will eventually happen in unmanaged code paths. That is, it's a very good thing for code to stop executing…