MS Research

While in Cambridge, England recently for the MSR Cambridge 10 year anniversary and MSR Cambridge PhD Summer School (stay tuned for coverage on this on Channel 8...) I caught up withSimon Peyton-Jones, Erik Meijer and, very briefly (too briefly), Butler Lampson to talk about what's going on…

Drawbridge is a research prototype of a new form of virtualization for application sandboxing. Drawbridge combines two core technologies: First, a picoprocess, which is a process-based isolation container with a minimal kernel API surface. Second, a library OS, which is a version of Windows…

MS Researchers Jim Larus and Galen Hunt lead an intriguing project where they've built an OS using managed code. The project is known as Singularity. In their own words: Singularity is a research project focused on the construction of dependable systems through innovation in the areas of…

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…

Orleans is a Microsoft Research (MSR) project and managed (.NET) software framework for building client + cloud applications. As outlined in the recently released paper on the topic: Orleans defines an actor-like model of isolated grains that communicate through asynchronous messages and…

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…

For many, Natural User Interface (NUI) is a new term, but over the past few years it's become an incredibly important one to Microsoft. If you want to know what we're thinking when it comes to computing in the future, you have to know NUI. So we go right to the source speaking to Principle…

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…

Here is the long-awaited demo of the latest incarnation of Singularity, a research operating system written primarily in safe C#. See Singularity III: Return of the SIP, here.

Recently, we visited MSR Cambridge(UK) to meet some of the great minds working there. In this case, we were fortunate enough to get an hour's time with Simon Peyton-Jones and Tim Harris, who are researchers working on a very hard problem: making it easier (more predictable, more reliable, more…