Entries for Charles

C9 Lectures: Brian Beckman - Covariance and Contravariance in Physics 1 of 1

Charles — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:22:00 GMT

By now, you know Brian Beckman given how many times he's been featured on Channel 9 and, well, just how amazing he is. Brian is an astrophysicist and software architect currently working on a technology we can't talk about...yet... :) Stay tuned for that. Dr. Beckman is the perfect choice for a new lecture in the C9 Lectures series. This is a single lecture, but there will be more interesting conversations to come on this deep and beautiful topic (in some sense, this is all about symmetry).

In the Rx interview with Brian and Erik Meijer, a short discussion on covariance and contravariance took place as a tangential topic (which often happens in real conversations - and we love that!). The concepts of co/contravariance can confuse and confound. Also, they are not just related to programming.

Here, Dr. Beckman teaches us about covariance and contravariance in physics. Are these universal properties? Do they apply to the mathematics of physics (from quantum mechanics to black holes) in the same basic way they do for general purpose programming with objects and lists, for example?

Tune in. This is a deep dive lecture and quite mathematical. Don't be scared. As usual, Brian explains complex things in a readily understandable fashion for mere mortals. If you have no experience with math and physics, this may be a bit challenging, but certainly not entirely over your head.

Enjoy.

NOTE: You should download the supporting document and slides. This will help you learn faster!

Joe Stegman: Silverlight 4 - Out of Browser Evolves

Charles — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:19:00 GMT

Joe Stegman, Director of Program Management on the Silverlight team, joins us to discuss Silverlight 4's Out of Browser improvements (OOB means you can run Silverlight applications on the desktop, outside of, well, the browser...). Of note, you can now interop with COM objects in SL4's OOB. We also touch on the the future of Silverlight and clearly define the distinctions/differences between Silverlight and WPF. When to use SL? When to use WPF?

Enjoy.

Wes Dyer and Stephen Toub: Rx and Px - Working Together

Charles — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:56:00 GMT

Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) released this week during PDC09. Rx uses Parallel Extensions for .NET (Px) for all of it's concurrent and parallel computing needs. How is it using Px, specifically? What's going on here and why?

Stephen Toub, PM on the Px team, and Wes Dyer, developer on the Rx team, tell us all about this partnership the experience of collaborating on two very compatible technologies that, taken together, create something beautiful. Some many xs, so little time.

Enjoy.

C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals Chapter 8 of 13

Charles — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:55:00 GMT

IE 9: Surfing on the GPU with D2D

Charles — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:58:00 GMT

The IE team is busy working on the next version of the world's most popular browser. IE 8 is the most widely used browser on Windows. IE 9 is currently in the oven and the IE team is ready to talk about what they're working on. Here, IE GM Dean Hachamovitch leads us through the halls of IE (literarally) and takes us to meet graphics developer Christian Fortini and test lead Anjali Parikh. They're taking IE to a new level with all graphic rendering taking place on the GPU via the DirectX technology D2D. So, IE 9 will take advantage of the power of the GPU for all page rendering and, further, enable web developers to exploit this power in ways they already understand (CSS, DHTML, JavaScript). The increase in performance and smooth rendering is stunning as you will see in the demos that are part of this conversation. This is incredible news for web developers and web surfers. IE 9, surfing the GPU! Oh yeah.

Be sure to check out interviews on IE 9's new JS engine and the importance of testing to achieving interoperable standards.

Enjoy.

GalaxyZoo: Citizen Science for Classifying Galaxies

Charles — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:34:00 GMT

Mike Taulty interviews Chris Lintott and Arfon Smith about the GalaxyZoo project. GalaxyZoo, hosted on GalaxyZoo.org, invites individuals to participate in Citizen Science and provides an easy to use interface for classifying galaxies.

Chris talks about the Galaxy Zoo and Citizen Science, followed by Arfon talking about the platform behind the project, and it’s migration from Rails/MySQL on Amazon to Windows Azure/SQL Azure.

IE 9: Standards and Interoperability

Charles — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:22:00 GMT

The IE team is busy working on the next version of the world's most popular browser. IE 8 is the most widely used browser on Windows. IE 9 is currently in the oven and the IE team is ready to talk about what they're working on. Here, IE GM Dean Hachamovitch introduces some of the key advances his team is making and leads us through the halls of IE (literarally) to learn from the engineers who are building the future of IE. John Hrvatin and Kris Krueger talk to us about where they are with improvements in IE 9's interoperability and standards support.

IE 9: First look at the new JS Engine

Charles — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:22:00 GMT

The IE team is busy working on the next version of the world's most popular browser. IE 8 is the most widely used browser on Windows. IE 9 is currently in the oven and the IE team is ready to talk about what they're working on. Here, JavaScript engine team members John Montgomery, Steve Lucco and Shanku Niyogi give us an early look at the new JS engine that will ship with IE 9. As of the interview, it is on par with the latest performance numbers of the latest Firefox beta and making progress in catching up to Chrome's latest V8. Again, this is a really early look at where the JS engine is and where it's going (and what they've done, architecturally, to speed up IE's JS engine). Enjoy!

Manuvir Das: Windows Azure One Year Later

Charles — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:47:00 GMT

Manuvir Das discusses the current state of Windows Azure. The last time we spoke was at last year's PDC when we announced Azure to the world. Here, we dig into hat's new today with Azure. How have people used Azure over the past year? What worked? What didn't work? Tune in. It's always great to chat with Manuvir and there's a lot of great info in this conversation.

Getting Started with Rx Extensions for .NET

Charles — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:57:00 GMT

Reactive Extensions for .NET, Rx, is here!!!

Reactive Extensions team member and software developer Jeffrey Van Gogh shows us how to get started with Rx, how to install the bits, find the help documentation and add Rx into your visual studio project - all in 2 minutes!

Erik Meijer: Rx in 15 Minutes - Rx is Here!!!!!

Charles — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:53:00 GMT

Reactive Extensions for .NET, Rx, is here!!!

Erik Mejier explains what Rx is and why it matters in 15 minutes or less!

Buidling on Azure: OriginDigital [Buidling on Azure: OriginDigital]

Charles — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:31:00 GMT

Mark Richards, VP Business Development and R&D.

Microsoft Partner OriginDigital is a video applications service provider that uses Azure for dynamically scaling video transcoding, allowing them to access markets all around the world. Azure allows them to easily scale up and handle spikes when needed.

in reply to Buidling on Azure: OriginDigital

Building on Azure: Persistent Systems [Building on Azure: Persistent Systems]

Charles — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:31:00 GMT

Working with their huge data set of up to 2000 nodes, Persistent Systems is pushing the computation up to the cloud when there is a spike or a high need. This particular use case is beneficial because they don’t have to manage the data—because Azure handles it for them—and they are better able to handle the varied load. Harsh Thakur, Manager, Technology Solutions Group, Persistent Systems

and Sandeep Maurya, Module Lead, Persistent Systems explain....

in reply to Building on Azure: Persistent Systems

Building on Azure: Siemens

Charles — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:30:00 GMT

Siemens, a Microsoft Partner, is using Azure for a remote service use case. By using Azure, Siemens doesn’t need to create a new IT department to manage clusters all over the world: Azure spins up the instances. This allows Siemens to only worry about computation, and Microsoft addresses the hardware, people, and IT costs. Gerald Kaefer, Siemens Architect, explains...

Building on Azure: KBB.com [Building on Azure: KBB.com]

Charles — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:29:00 GMT

Kelley Blue Book uses Windows Azure for a cloud-bursting scenario, eliminating their need for a backup data center in times of high traffic. This has saved them $100,000 per year. John Parker, Solution Architect, Kelley Blue Book, explains...

in reply to Building on Azure: KBB.com

Introducing "Dallas" [Introducing "Dallas"]

Charles — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:18:00 GMT

Christian Liensberger, Moe Khosravy and Microsoft introduces a new information service, Microsoft Codename “Dallas,” also available through Pinpoint and built completely on the Windows Azure platform that enables developers and users to access premium commercial and reference datasets and content on any platform. Datasets currently available through “Dallas” include those from the Associated Press, Citysearch, DATA.gov, ESRI, First American Corp., infoUSA.com Inc., NASA, National Geographic TOPO!, NAVTEQ, RiskMetrics Group, the United Nations, WaveMarket Inc. and Weather Central Inc. Starting today, “Dallas” is available as a limited community technology preview (CTP).

in reply to Introducing "Dallas"

E2E: Erik Meijer and Dave Campbell: Data, Databases and the Cloud

Charles — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:03:00 GMT

Dave Campbell is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and long time database architect. Today, Dave works on the hardest problems facing SQL's foray into the new world of cloud computing. His latest project in this space takes the form of SQL Azure. What is SQL Azure? What's the different with the cloud and what we already experience with SQL server running in a clustered environment and reachable via the Internet? How does this focus on cloud computing and impact the evolution of database design? What's going here? What's next? Erik Meijer, de facto E2E host and language designer, interviews Dave to ge answers to some of these questions. Erik works for Dave, by the way, and as you can see that doesn't stop Erik from asking more than softball questions.

Dave will be presenting at PDC09 in the Technical Leaders track. His talk will focus on ambient data and what this means for the evolution of ways to understand and shape the data this all around us using software. You should attend his session and come with questions if you are going to be at PDC. If you're not going to be there, then make sure to ask Dave questions when he appears on Channel 9 Live!

Enjoy!

E2E: Erik Meijer and Patrick Dussud - Inside Garbage Collection

Charles — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Patrick Dussud is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft who is the author of .NET's garbage collector (GC) - the automatic memory management infrastructure that makes up most of what is managed in managed code execution. How does GC, work, generally? Why is it important? The GC inside of the CLR is of a specfic type - ephemeral, concurrent (the server version has always been concuurent and now with Background GC on the client in CLR 4, GC is concurrent on the client as well, but there are differences...).

Patrick takes us through the basics of GC up to the current state of the art in this outstanding conversation with one of the fathers of .NET. Of course, given the other expert in the room - programming language designer Erik Meijer, we have to talk about the impact that dynamic and functional languages have on the design of general purpose GCs as well as future directions of the CLR's GC, generally. What's Patrick working on these days?

Patrick will be presenting at PDC09 in the the Technical Leaders track. His talk, Future of GC, should not be missed. This conversation is a great introduction to what Patrick will be talking about and we highly recommend you watch this before you attend his session (or watch his session after the show shortly after the PDC ends - like last year, all sessions will be available on-demand...).

Enjoy.

MFC: Implementing handlers for preview, thumbnail and search filtering

Charles — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:37:00 GMT

This is a short demonstration of new MFC features in MFC and ATL which help with integrating your application’s file type into Windows Explorer. This is done by implementing handlers for preview, thumbnail and search filtering, all of which are implemented in an application generated by the MFC application wizard. Pat Brenner, MFC guru and one of the folks who design and implement MFC is your host.

MFC: Integrating your application with the Windows Restart Manager

Charles — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:37:00 GMT

This is a short demonstration of new MFC features in MFC which help with integrating your application with the Windows Restart Manager. This is done by implementing handlers for restart and crash recovery, and by integrating an auto-save feature that uses the document-view architecture to save intermediate temporary copies of your document. This is implemented in an application generated by the MFC application wizard. Pat Brenner, MFC guru and one of the folks who design and implement MFC is your host.

Check out Pat's screencast tutorial on implementing handlers for preview, thumbnail and search filtering

Windows Embedded: Past, Present and Future

Charles — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:14:00 GMT

Windows Embedded Standard is a general purpose OS, based on the Windows codebase, that is highly modular and fine tuned to run on a number of devices ranging in size and complexity (but less powerful and kess general purpose in nature than your average PC) that are x86/x64 powered (casino gaming consoles, retail kiosks, hand-held devices, etc). The next version of Windows Embedded Standard will arrive some time in 2010 - thus the name Windows Embedded Standard 2011.

Windows Embedded is the general term for all Windows embedded products including Windows Embedded Standard, Windows Embedded Compact (aka CE), Windows Embedded Server, Windows Embedded Enterprise.

For the Windows Embedded Standard product line, product examples are Windows XP Embedded (aka XPe), Windows Embedded Standard 2009, Windows Embedded Standard 2011, Windows Embedded POSReady 2009.

We figured it would be a good idea to meet some of the developers who write Windows Embedded Standard to get a better understanding of, well, exactly what it is and where it is going. Here, we meet and chat with Windows Embedded Standard developers Oren Winter, Jon Parati, Mike Moini and Milong Sabandith. What are the key new features in Windows Embedded Standard 2011? What is Windows Embedded Standard 2011, exactly? What's Windows Embedded CE, again? How is Windows Embedded related to Windows proper? Windows Embedded Standard 2011 is built from the same sources that make up Windows 7? What's different between the two and why? How is Windows Embedded Standard able to be so modular? What's the developer story for Windows Embedded Standard 2011? And more. Tune in. Classic Channel 9.

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C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals Chapter 7 of 13

Charles — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:42:00 GMT

We've kicked off C9 Lectures with a journey into the world of Functional Programming with functional language purist and high priest of the lambda calculus, Dr. Erik Meijer (you can thank Erik for many of the functional constructs that have shown up in languages like C# and VB.NET. When you use LINQ, thank Erik in addition to Anders).

We will release a new chapter in this series every Thursday.

In Chapter 7, Dr. Meijer teaches us about Higher-Order Functions. A function is called higher-order if it takes a function as an argument and returns a function as a result:

twice :: (a -> a) -> a -> a
twice f x = f (f x)

The function twice above is higher order because it takes a function (f x) as it first argument and returns a function (f(fx))

Dr. Meijer will elaborate on why higher-order functions are important and there are some really interesting side-effects of higher-order functions such as defining DSLs as collections of higher-order functions and using algebraic properties of higher-order functions to reason about programs.

You should watch these in sequence (or skip around depending on your curent level of knowledge in this domain):

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6

Now, we do have a textbook and you should go buy it: The great Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. We worked with the publisher, Cambridge University Press, to get all Niners a 20% discount on the book. Now, you don't need the book to learn a great deal from this lecture series since Graham's website has all the slides and samples from the book as well as answers to the exercises. That said, it's highly recommended reading and you should consider it.

The promotion code is 09HASK and it is vaild on both the Hardback:

9780521871723 and Paperback: 9780521692694. The catalog pages are:

Hardback:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521871723 and the paperback is:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521692694

Note: This special offer is valid until December 31, 2009

C9 Conversations: Yousef Khalidi on Cloud Computing

Charles — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:46:00 GMT

Yousef Khalidi is a Distinguished Engineer with a rich history in both operating system design and distributed computing. Yousef is responsible for the overall design of Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud operating system (which includes the Azure development platform in addition to the "OS", aka Windows Azure). Windows Azure is an operating system in the sense that it supplies a host of core services, process scheduling and management, identity management, etc, that we typically expect from a general purpose operating system.

In this first installment of C9 Conversations (we sit down with various Microsoft technical leaders to discuss a wide range of topics related to general purpose computing; all in high quality video and audio (big thanks to Tina Summerford for producing this new series)), the topic is cloud computing. What is it, exactly? Why does it matter? What are the challenges involved in taking software to the cloud? What does that mean, exactly? Is Windows Azure an operating system by analogy? What is Windows Azure, exactly? And more..

Yousef will be presenting his ideas on cloud computing and its future at PDC09 as part of the Technical Leaders track. Make sure to attend his talk if you're interested in how Microsoft thinks about the future of cloud computing.

Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) and Software Security Today

Charles — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:49:00 GMT

The Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) team recently released two new security tools, BinScope Binary Analyzer and MiniFuzz File Fuzzer, to help you write more secure code. Jeremy Dallman, Michael Howard, and Ivan Medvedev created these tools so we decided to pay them a visit to chat about what these tools do and why they matter. Of course, it's been way too long since Michael Howard has preached to us from his security soapbox so we just had to get him talking about the general state of software security today and where it's going!

For the Microsoft SDL team, SDL is as much a lifestyle as it is a software development lifecycle. Developers, thrive securely so that others may securely thrive. Oh yeah, brothers and sisters. I'm sensing the need for a security soapbox show on 9. We need more preaching. There's still far too many developers writing insecure code. "Reverend" Howard, are you game, sir?

Get BinScope and MiniFuzz on SDL Tool Repository. Please use them!!!

Stay updated on the SDL at:

http://www.microsoft.com/sdl

http://blogs.msdn.com/sdl

C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals Chapter 6 of 13

Charles — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:53:00 GMT

Some functions, such as factorial, are simpler to define in terms of other functions. As we shall see, however, many functions can naturally be defined in terms of themselves.

Properties of functions defined using recursion can be proved using the simple but powerful mathematical technique of induction.

You should watch these in sequence (or skip around depending on your curent level of knowledge in this domain):

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5

Now, we do have a textbook and you should go buy it: The great Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. We worked with the publisher, Cambridge University Press, to get all Niners a 20% discount on the book. Now, you don't need the book to learn a great deal from this lecture series since Graham's website has all the slides and samples from the book as well as answers to the exercises. That said, it's highly recommended reading and you should consider it.

The promotion code is 09HASK and it is vaild on both the Hardback:

9780521871723 and Paperback: 9780521692694. The catalog pages are:

Hardback:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521871723 and the paperback is:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521692694

Note: This special offer is valid until December 31, 2009