Operating System

Rob Short is an operating system pioneer. He helped Microsoft transition from the 1980s with DOS and 16 bit windows into the 32 bit world with Windows NT in the 1990s. More recently, Rob was part of the team that further enhanced windows to take advantage of the 64 bit processors of the new…

This is part two of our discussion with Scott Field, one of the minds behind Vista's security architecture (hint: he likes the way onions are constructed...). Jeremy Mazner helps conduct this interview, which contains explicit whiteboard scenes and frank talk about security and the future of…

Scott Field is an Architect who's been working on software security at Microsoft for twelve years. His most recent work has been focused on improving security in general purpose monolithic operating systems, from the kernel to the shell. You've heard a lot about how Vista is our most secure OS…

We recently had a conversation with Ales Holecek, Director of Development for the Windows Shell team (Raymond Chen, the famous Win32 blogger, works for him...).  Ales spends most of the time answering a single, broad question: What is the Windows Vista shell? Of course,…

Michael Fortin is a Distingushed Engineer and leads the team at Microsoft responsible for the overall performance of Windows (the folks who think up and write the algorithms that help make Windows Vista intelligently performant. Intelligently performant? What does that mean? Tune in...). I…

From the kernel to the shell, Windows Vista is a very different OS than XPSP2. How so? Here, Charles interviews Architect Narayanan Ganapathy whose team of highly skilled engineers write the Windows IO system, driver frameworks and related technologies. So, what, exactly, is new in Windows…

Ever wonder how threads and processes are managed in Windows? What's new in Windows Vista in terms of Process Management? Vista introduces a new type of process called a protected process. What are "protected processes"? How do they work? What's a Process, anyway? A thread? Here, Arun…

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.

It's been a while since we checked in with the Singularity folks over in MSR Redmond. You know, the usual suspects like Jim Larus and Galen Hunt. So, Charles went and visited them recently to see where they are with Singularity, see what they're up to, what's new... As you may expect, they…

Bringing a wealth of experience from having worked in a variety of roles including architect, project manager, developer and technical writer, Mike Benkovich is a published author with WROX Press and APress Books, writing primarily about getting the most from your SQL Server database. Since…