Operating System

Artists embody a diverse set of talents and interests. This gives them a rich array of experiences to draw upon in their work. In the same way, Richard Ward brings an eclectic background and collection of interests to his efforts at Microsoft.  He brings this diversity to his own art of…

Microsoft Research Cambridge turned 10 years old this week. Happy birthday MSRC! I was lucky enough to have been there (in fact I am still there, or is that here, as I type) and conducted several interviews with some of the many unusually intelligent and passionate folks who think about 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…

Ever wonder how we make Windows skus (not why necessarily, though we do cover that briefly, but how, exactly)? How do OEMs like Dell or HP or Whoever get Windows skus onto the millions of PCs they make? Closer to home, how does Microsoft build Windows skus, anyway? How do we build Windows for that…

What happens, exactly, when you turn your computer on? Yeah, you see the black screen and words scroll by, then, finally, the Vista startup sound... But, there's a good deal of code that runs in this preOS environment, much of it composed in languages you've probably never written (like 16-Bit…

Ever wonder about the physiology of a dying process? How, exactly, does an OS, like Windows Vista for example, know when a process is dying or hung or just out of its mind? What does Vista do, exactly, when it encounters a troubled process? Well, Kinshuman, a Windows core os dev lead, Cornel…

Windows Vista is the first general purpose consumer-grade OS that provides transactional support (ACID) for file IO and Windows Registry modification operations (these are only two of the consumers of KTM - point is, you are enabled to write your own). In this interview, we meet Jon Cargille, the…

Sometimes problems occur (system or application level exceptions happen, applications might crash, hard disks fail) in complicated systems like modern personal computers. In Vista, the system is capable of understanding a wide variety of problems as they occur and, in many cases, fix them without…

"Time Warp" is an awfully cool code name, but an even cooler file system technology that's part of Vista. So cool in fact, that I am taking the chance of getting yelled at for revealing it here as it's frowned upon (typically) to use code names for products that have…

Welcome to Vista Week on Channel 9. For 9 days (that's one Channel 9 week) we will be focusing our content on the newest general purpose operating system from Microsoft, Windows Vista. Windows Vista was designed from the ground up with the user in mind. From reliability, performance, security,…