Reliability

Windows 7 is capable of certain levels of self-repair, as you've learned. One of the new capabilities in Windows is its ability to recover from serious failures that can impact the OS's ability to boot. How does Windows 7 handle these errors? Can you boot Windows 7 into Safe Mode or to an earlier…

I caught up with the great Rico Mariani, Visual Studio's Chief Software Architect, after his keynote at a VS partner conference held on the Microsoft campus. He tells us all about the improvements in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. Rico and team have taken the performance and reliability of…

RADAR is a memory leak detection technology built into Windows 7 and integrated with Watson (error reporting) and AutoBug (automatic bug filing). It allows Microsoft product teams and third parties to discover and fix memory leaks early in the product cycle and after release. Since RADAR runs…

Windows Development Manager Melur Raghuraman and team have taken troubleshooting and diagnostics to a whole new level in Windows 7. For one thing, Windows 7 uses managed code "natively" as PowerShell has become the de facto language used for creating diagnostic algorithms that live inside…

!Analyze is an automatic root cause analysis tool for software failures. For years, it has provided insight to engineers both inside and outside of Microsoft. It is a key enabling technology behind numerous higher-level feedback systems, including Windows Error Reporting and Watson. !Analyze runs…

PerfTrack is the feedback and monitoring system inside of Windows 7 that performs measurements on, well, all things related to the overall performance of the OS, especially as it relates to system responsiveness to user actions. So, when you click on something (an icon, a folder…

The Windows 7 project involved very efficient software engineering planning and execution. It is no surprise that an equivalent level of efficiency exists throughout the OS (efficiency in how the OS deals with faults, threads, memory management, power management, process…

Sebastian Burckhardt gives a short tutorial of some of the new features of CHESS: data race detection and ChessBoard. CHESS is a concurrency testing tool takes a concurrent unit test and executes it with different thread schedules. Sebastian explains us how CHESS can detect…

IE team General Manager Dean Hachamovitch and IE Test Manager Jason Upton sit down with me to discuss the significance of today's IE 8 RC1 release. What did the IE team learn from the Beta 2 release? What changes did they make in response to customer feedback? Will the IE team still…

Gabriel Aul is a 16 year Microsoft veteran who has always had his hand in the chaotic world of system performance and reliability, from technical product support and testing to being a leader on the Windows performance team. In fact, he was part of the team that developed the original Watson…