charles

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

Dave Thompson: Turning Software into Services

Charles — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:23:00 GMT

Dave Thompson, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Online Services, is an industry veteran with 30 years of experience in IT. In his leadership role for Microsoft Online Services, Dave is responsible for leading the delivery of Microsoft's business software products as online services. Dave has a rich history solving complex problems in computing. He's the guy that put TCP into Windows, back in the day. Today, his focus is squarely on taking Microsoft's business platform to the next level, up to the cloud. What does this all mean, exactly? How complex is it to take traditional software and turn it into a service? What are the big problems that Dave and team face? How does this concentrated focus on services benefit developers and businesses that build their innovations on the Microsoft stack?

Tune in. Meet Dave and get a clear sense of where we are heading as Microsoft continues the evolution of PC and server software. These are exciting times for Microsoft, and We are bringing our partners into this new territory with us. Fascinating times indeed. Keep up the great work Dave and team!

Wolfgang Grieskamp and Keith Stobie: Spec Explorer - An Overview

Charles — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:46:00 GMT

Spec Explorer is a visual tool for modeling software behavior and generating test suites from those models. It has just been released on DevLabs.

Here, architects Wolfgang Grieskamp and Keith Stobie join us to discuss the thinking behind Spec Explorer. You can see Spec Explorer in action here. What problems does the model-based approach to testing solve? How is Spec Explorer related to contractual programming (Spec#, .NET Contracts, etc)? What's the holy grail of this approach to advanced and efficient testing? Everything has a rich history and Spec Explorer is no exception. What is the history here? What's next?

Spec Explorer Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/SpecExplorer

Pat Brenner: Visual Studio 2010 - MFC and Windows 7

Charles — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:54:00 GMT

Microsoft Foundation Classes for C++ (MFC) continue to evolve and will ship with Visual Studio 2010. In fact, you can start playing with the updated and improved MFC right now by downloading the VS 2010 Beta 2.

MFC wraps native Windows APIs in convenient C++ wrapper classes that are defined for many Windows objects and common window controls. Not surprisingly, MFC wraps some of the new capabilities in Windows 7 (and will continue to do so in the future).

Some of the key MFC updates in VS 2010 Beta 2 are:

Improved interaction with Windows Explorer:

Windows7 taskbar interaction with preview
Preview, thumbnail and search filter handlers for file types

Ribbon UI improvements:

Ribbon is now an XML resource in the application
A new designer for the ribbon
Visual manager for Windows7 ribbon style

Restart manager support:

Application restart or crash handled more elegantly
Document auto-save and restore handled completely within MFC (if wanted)

Software Developer and 20 year Microsoft veteran Pat Brenner sits down with us to discuss the new and improved MFC and how it takes advantage of new Windows 7 features in the typically convenient MFC way.

Enjoy!

Rico Mariani: Inside Visual Studio Beta 2 - Performance and Reliability

Charles — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:48:00 GMT

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 Visual Studio to new levels in this release. Gone are the days of synchronous assembly and COM component reference look-ups (woo hoo!!!). Gone are the long start up times. Gone are roughly 90% of the performance bottlenecks that slowed down the development experience inside the VS2010 Beta 1 IDE. The Visual Studio development team worked their tails off to improve perf and reliability across the board. Tune in to learn about what they did and what they will do prior to RTM. Truly excellent engineering goes on in building 42. Well done, team!

Rico also discusses his final blog post in his VS history series, a 5,000 word up to the minute historical piece. After watching Tina's great VS documentary series, Rico decided to add his own perspective in a 10 part blog post blitz. Great stuff!

Enjoy.

Immo Landwerth: Future Directions of Native Image Generation via NGen

Charles — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:42:00 GMT

Immo Landwerth is a self-confessed Niner who spends a fair amount of time lurking on C9 and watching videos. In fact, he decided to apply for an internship at Microsoft this past Summer because of the videos on C9. Wow. That's cool!

Immo is from Germany where he is working on his Masters degree in computer science. What better team to intern with than the CLR team? What better problem to spend the summer investigating than how to make the Native Image Generator (Ngen) a more granular "service" and without requiring admin rights to create native images?

Imagine a world where NGen would run when it needed to (in addition to what it does today as part of an application installation process), automatically, and target specific and isolated pieces of the application(binaries that require re-Ngen'ing). Make sense? No? Well, Immo is a very articulate young man, so let him explain it to you. Great thinking, Immo. Looking forward to watching what happens here as NGen evolves.

Good luck, Immo! Hopefully, we'll see you soon when you come to work full time on the CLR team! :)

Introducing Microsoft Office Starter 2010

Charles — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:02:00 GMT

Microsoft introduces Office Starter 2010, which includes Word Starter 2010 and Excel 2010. Brian Albrecht and Scott Kahler tell us more about these basic, ad-supported versions of our most popular productivity applications. Note that this is essentially a commercial for the new technology in Office 2010. We will go deeper in the future and in a more conversational manner. Please do ask questions here and on the Office 2010 engineering blog, where you can much more about this great addition to Office.

Introducing Click-to-Run in Office 2010

Charles — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:00:00 GMT

John Jendrezak and Trevor McDiarmid give us a first look at Click-to-Run, an innovative new Electronic Software Distribution (ESD) technology for Office 2010 that utilizes Microsoft’s streaming and virtualization technology (AppVirt - you learned a great deal about this technology right here on Channel 9...). It's great to see application virtualization in the mainstream. Note that this is essentially a commercial for the new technology in Office 2010. We will go deeper in the future and in a more conversational manner. Please do ask questions here and on the Office 2010 engineering blog, where you can much more about this great addition to Office.

Niners on 9: Sven Groot - Past, Present and Future

Charles — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:25:00 GMT

Sven Groot is a long time Niner and one of the more active contributors to the C9 forums (you'll note that Sven answers technical questions when he can and has always been respectful in the way he interacts with his fellow Niners). Sven is also a PhD student at Tokyo University where he is working on and thinking about large scale distributed clustered computing (now we know why he was so keen on my producing a Dryad piece for Going Deep - Sven is a clever guy...).

Sven was in town recently on vacation in Seattle (why not Maui or one of the Tahitian islands, man?), so we had to interview him. Also, I brought Sven to a randomly generated team meeting of one of the most innovative teams at Microsoft (and filmed it). So you will see more of Sven and learn more about some very interesting technologies, but here we learn all about Sven, the man, the legend.

We cover a lot in this impromptu conversation and Sven has many interesting things to say about cloudy computation and the future of distributed computation somewhere up there. It's great to have you as a vocal member of Channel 9, Sven. Thank you for the feedback on C9 (some of which is shared in this conversation) and for being helpful to your fellow Niners. See, Niners, when you come to Seattle, you never know if you will sit down in front of a camera, rolling 9.

Enjoy and thank you again, Sven!

Scott Guthrie: Introducing WebsiteSpark and Web Platform Installer V2 RTM

Charles — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:00:00 GMT

Today, we introduce WebsiteSpark, a new program that invests in small web dev companies by giving them free software, free support and free marketing. Wait. What?

To explain what this means, exactly, VP of the .NET platform and web technologies, Scott Guthrie, joins us for an insightful conversation. Why are we doing this, anyway? What's the story? What's next?

Here's a hint:

WebsiteSpark is a new global program, designed by Microsoft to help small professional Web development and design service companies succeed, by providing new business opportunities through connections with global partners and customers, support and training, and software tools – at no upfront cost.

OK. So, free tools and support for small web dev companies? Very cool! Explain...

Learn more details on Scott's latest blog post.

We also announced the RTM of Web Platform Installer V2 and an updated Web App Gallery.

Tune in.

Announcing Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp at PDC09 (and it's free!)

Charles — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:19:00 GMT

We just announced a day of free training on November 16, 2009 in LA as part of PDC09. Did I mention that it is free, that it will include deep dives into the depth of Windows from folks like Mark Russinovich, Landy Wang and Arun Kishan? Wait, did I just write that?!

This is AWESOME. If you are a Windows developer and in the LA area I would highly encourage you to attend this free day of training.

The event is FREE to any one, it does not matter whether you are attending PDC.

The event is first-come-first serve and there is limited capacity, so sign-up early!

The event will be fast-paced and very dense; we are condensing several weeks worth of blog, documentation and code reading into 8 hours... It truly is a great way to dive quickly into Windows 7. Going Deep in real time! :)

The event is coordinated with other PDC sessions, we aim to minimize overlap, and make sure there is good segues from the boot camp to PDC sessions.

There will be more speakers announced next week. Stay tuned!

Instructions for PDC09 conference attendees. Enter the regular registration process through the Registration page, and click on the orange register now button. Select ‘register for the event’ as your registration type. You’ll be able to add the Boot Camp as a workshop during the registration process. If you have already registered, simply login and update your registration record to include the Boot Camp.

Instructions for non-attendees. Enter the regular registration process through the Registration page, and click on the orange register now button. Select ‘register for workshop only pass’ as your registration type. When you get to the workshop selection page of the registration form, you'll be able to pick the Windows 7 Boot Camp as a free item.

Andrew Kennedy: F# Units of Measure

Charles — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Floating point values in F# can have associated units of measure, which are typically used to indicate length, volume, mass, and so on. The built-in type float takes an optional unit-of-measure parameter, written in angle brackets, in a similar way that types such as IEnumerable take a type parameter, as in IEnumerable<int>.

By using quantities with units, you enable the compiler to verify that arithmetic relationships have the correct units, which helps prevent programming errors like the one that led to NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter being lost in September 1999. This was due to confusion between metric and so-called "English" units of measurement. The accident could have been prevented if the NASA engineers had been able to annotate their program code with units, and then employed static analysis tools or language-level type-checking to detect and fix any unit errors.

Andrew Kennedy is an MSR research scientist who implemented units of measure for F#. What did this involve? How does it work, exactly? What's next? Meet Andrew and learn all about F#'s latest language feature, units of measure.

Enjoy.

Information sources: http://msdn.com and http://blogs.msdn.com/andrewkennedy/

Parallel Performance Tuning for Haskell

Charles — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:30:00 GMT

Very interesting work with implications for integration into more mainstream runtimes... In general, runtime support for parallel tuning is necessary going forward. The Many Core age has only just begun... This paper is a great read.

Parallel Haskell programming has entered the mainstream with support now included in GHC for multiple parallel programming models, along with multicore execution support in the runtime. However, tuning programs for parallelism is still something of a black art. Without much in the way of feedback provided by the runtime system, it is a matter of trial and error combined with experience to achieve good parallel speedups.

This paper describes an early prototype of a parallel profiling system for multicore programming with GHC. The system comprises three parts: fast event tracing in the runtime, a Haskell library for reading the resulting trace files, and a number of tools built on this library for presenting the information to the programmer. We focus on one tool in particular, a graphical timeline browser called ThreadScope.

George Moore: Windows Azure Business Model for Developers - An Introduction

Charles — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:03:00 GMT

21 year Microsoft veteran and Software Architect George Moore is involved in defining and implementing an effective strategy for taking Windows Azure from technology preview to enterprise business ready. Specifically, George is responsible for all integration of all Azure services (Windows Azure, SQL Azure, .NET Services) to other systems at Microsoft. This includes the billing system integration across all Azure services, the business owner portal, and the developer portal for all Azure services.

Here, we get to know a bit more about the thinking behind the commercialization of Windows Azure (which you will learn more about in great detail at PDC 09). We also learn more about George and his 21 years at the company. He's been a part of some very interesting and innovative technologies over the years not the least of which is the CCR (he led the team that created it).

Tune in. This is classic C9. Human. Insightful. Unscripted.

Enjoy

David Grant and Ryan Kivett: !Analyze - Automatic Root Cause Analysis

Charles — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:33:00 GMT

!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 millions of times each day, producing actionable results from reliability telemetry data sent to Microsoft. Ordinary debugging tools report the file and function where a failure ended. !Analyze pinpoints where the failure started.

How does it work, exactly? What's the story behind !Analyze?

Meet two of the Software Developers behind !Analyze, David Grant and Ryan Kivett. They share with us how !Analyze works, it's history and provide a glimpse into it's potential future.Tune in.

Great job, !Analyze team!

Christian Kleinerman: Introduction to SQL Server Project Madison

Charles — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:21:00 GMT

The SQL Server team is working on a new project code-named “Madison”. "Madison" is a highly scalable data warehouse appliance that delivers performance at low cost through massively parallel processing (MPP). How does it work? What's the story? Well, "Madison" Product Unit Manager Christian Kleinerman sure knows the answers and he provides an introduction to this new SQL data warehousing technology. Tune in.

More info here:

http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/archive/2009/08/24/microsoft-ships-the-first-technology-preview-for-project-code-named-madison.aspx

Donald Farmer and Julie Strauss: Inside Project Gemini

Charles — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:16:00 GMT

Office Marketing says: "Need to make timely business decisions without having to use complicated and sluggish analytical applications? Love to use Excel? Project Gemini is an Excel 2010 add-in that allows you to create powerful analyses by quickly manipulating millions of rows of data into a single Excel workbook and utilize Microsoft Office 2010 to share and collaborate on your insights with your team."

Donald Farmer and Julie Strauss are Program Managers behind this new technology "Gemini". What is "Gemini"? How does it work? Why? What's it all really mean, anyway?

Tune in. Very interesting technology here. For all you spreadsheet jockeys out there, this should prove extraordinarliy useful to you when you need to crunch and analyze lots of data effeciently. Wow. 1,000,000 rows in Excel without causing a hang. Nice work, "Gemini" team!

Enjoy.

PS: The painting in the video has nothing to do with Project Gemini. It's an original art by Donald's wife.

Peter Villadsen and Gustavo Plancarte: X++ to MSIL

Charles — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:27:00 GMT

Dynamics Program Manager Peter Villadsen and Software Developer Gustavo Plancarte teach us about a new tool they've developed that translates X++ byte code into MSIL. We learn a lot of history along the way and gain insights into the process of taking X++ into the .NET age.

Microsoft Dynamics features a proprietary language called X++ (basically a superset of Java, with some strong data primitives added) and a complete stack (compiler, interpreter and debugger) that goes with it. The new feature Peter and team have developed is a tool to generate managed code from the X++ intermediate language produced by the X++ compiler. This will have profound impact on the performance of the business applications written in X++, and it very clearly points to where they'll be going in the next few releases of Dynamics Ax.

Tune in.

Doug Hauger: Inside the Windows Azure Platform Business Model

Charles — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:16:00 GMT

Meet Doug Hauger, Azure General Manager. Doug owns the business side of the Azure Platform equation. How was the pricing determined? Are there different plans for "garage innovators" versus large enterprise customers? What does it all really mean? Would we be able to finish the converstion in under 15 minutes (hard for me to do, as you know...:))? Of course, the complexity of the Azure business model would determine the time it takes to explain it (and the thinking behind it). Well, as you can see by the length of the interview, apparently the Azure people constructed a pricing model that is greatly simplified compared to some of our other business pricing models from years past. The overall simplicity of the plan is impressive.

Tune in. Meet one of the key minds behind the Azure business model and learn about some of the reasoning used in constructing the official plan:

Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET Services will be commercially available at the Professional Developer Conference 2009 and we hope you will continue building on the Community Technology Preview (CTP) at no cost today.

Upon commercial availability we will offer Windows Azure through a consumption-based pricing model, allowing partners and customers to pay only for the services that they consume.

Windows Azure:
Compute @ $0.12 / instance hour
Storage @ $0.15 / GB / month stored
Storage Transactions @ $0.01 / 10K

SQL Azure:
Web Edition – Up to 1 GB relational database @ $9.99 Business Edition – Up to 10 GB relational database @ $99.99

.NET Services:
Messages @ $0.15/100K message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens

STM.NET: Who. What. Why.

Charles — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:39:00 GMT

Software Transactional Memory is no longer a pipe dream or the stuff of academics. STM.NET, as it's called, is ready for your experimentation.

The goal of STM.NET is to be able to exploit concurrency by using components written by experts and consumed by application programmers who can then compose together these components using STM. Transactional memory provides an easy-to-use mechanism to do this safely. STM.NET is of course not a concurrency silver bullet and this is an experimental rrelease of the .NET Framework that allows C# programmers to try out this technology, specifically a particular implementation of STM.

The STM team really needs your feedback to understand if they're doing the right things to meet your needs. Traditionally, using STM for simple trasactional tasks didn't make sense. The overhead was too high. Is this still the case? What needed to change in the .NET Framework to enable STM.NET? Remember, this is a .NET Framework experiment to enable STM for managed code.

Here, we meet most of the team responsible for STM.NET: Chris Dern‎, Yossi Levanoni‎, Sasha Dadiomov‎, Weirong Zhu‎, Sukhdeep Sodhi‎ and Lingli Zhang.

Tune in, meet the team and get a good sense of what this very small team has accomplished with STM.NET and learn about some of the paths taken to get there. This represents really great engineering. Congratulations to the STM team! Now, Niners, go get the bits!

Enjoy.

David Fields and Bill Karagounis: Inside Windows 7 - Reliability, Performance and PerfTrack

Charles — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:31:00 GMT

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 name, etc...), how long does it take for the user to receive an expected reaction from the system? What are the bottlenecks that lead to a poor experience (user-observable latency) when using some feature in Windows? Is the root problem in the design of the feature itself or with the underlying OS? Enter PerfTrack.

Here, Development Manager David Fields and Group Program Manager Bill Karagounis share their wisdom and experience in the world of OS performance analysis. David and Bill explain how PerfTrack works and we digress into an interesting conversation about power management.

PerfTrack is an example of a technology that provides incredibly important real-world information to Windows engineers that can be used to solve performance problems in Windows.

Enjoy!

Inside the Active Template Library (ATL) Security Update

Charles — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:02:00 GMT

Today, Microsoft announced the details of an out-of-band security update that impacts ATL components and controls (like ActiveX controls, for example) -> Developers who have built controls using vulnerable versions of ATL should take immediate action to review and identify any vulnerabilities, modify and recompile their affected controls and components using the updated versions of ATL and finally distribute a non-vulnerable version of the controls and components to their customers.

Here, Damien Watkins from the VC++ team and Damian Hasse and Jonathan Ness from MSRC Engineering review the steps to identify and address vulnerable controls and components. Of course, being a Channel 9 interview, we dig into various aspects of the problem without veering away from the goal here: helping you understand the exact issues with this vulnerability. If you own a component or control that uses ATL, then you will know what you need to do to prevent a possible attack.

Please visit the URLs below as soon as possible for detailed information on this vulnerability.

Resources discussed in this video are available on MSDN: Active Template Library Security Update and Developers

Detailed technical information on this security release for ATL developers: http://blogs.technet.com/srd/archive/2009/07/28/overview-of-the-out-of-band-release.aspx

Additional information on this security release is available on the Security Research & Defense blog

Overview with background + table of links: http://blogs.technet.com/srd/archive/2009/07/28/overview-of-the-out-of-band-release.aspx

IE mitigation explanation: http://blogs.technet.com/srd/archive/2009/07/28/internet-explorer-mitigations-for-atl-data-stream-vulnerabilities.aspx

Deep dive for developers: http://blogs.technet.com/srd/archive/2009/07/28/atl-vulnerability-developer-deep-dive.aspx

How msvidctl.dll is related: http://blogs.technet.com/srd/archive/2009/07/28/msvidctl-ms09-032-and-the-atl-vulnerability.aspx

Michael Howard's perspective on this issue: http://blogs.msdn.com/sdl/archive/2009/07/28/atl-ms09-035-and-the-sdl.aspx

Michael Fortin: Windows 7 Efficiency

Charles — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:42:00 GMT

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 management, window management, graphics, audio, local search, diagnostics, and on and on - truly excellent, and efficient, engineering).

Michael Fortin is a Distinguished Engineer in the Windows Core Operating System Division. His team builds the technologies that help make Windows 7 reliable, stable and performant, which are core ingredients in any highly efficient general purpose operating system. You'll hear us talk about Windows 7 as a very efficient general purpose operating system quite a bit over the coming months. In fact, if I had to sum up Windows 7 in one word it would be Efficient.

Michael's team also builds the troubleshooting and diagnostics systems in Windows, including the internal mechanisms that construct fault data packages and sends them to cloud-based components which receive data from millions of clients running Windows 7. Michael's team is a global team - engineers are located in multiple places around the world including a stellar team of engineers located in Beijing, China (you'll meet them in the future right here on C9).

You may remember Michael from his last interview on Channel 9 that covered his work on Vista's SuperFetch and ReadyBoost technologies. Yep, these great technologies are alive and well in Windows 7 and have evolved to meet the needs of the evolving system and help add to the overall efficiency of Windows. (There, I wrote "efficiency" again...)

Over the past year or so, Michael's team has received, analyzed and acted upon a very large amount of data sent from Windows 7 Beta and RC running on a variety of PCs with a variety of hardware and software configurations in place. This data was used to construct new system features, like the Fault Tolerant Heap, and to engineer updates to existing mechanisms to make them more robust or performant or reliable or stable... You will meet some of his team here on C9 in the future and we will dig into many of the mechanisms Michael touched on in this conversation (Fault Tolerant Heap, Troubleshooting and Diagnostics, etc).

Here, Michael and I chat about the work his team has done, the engineering philosophy that has driven efficiency into Windows at all levels (from the kernel to the shell), the knowledge his team has gained about how Windows is used in the wild, what the most common problems have been and the solutions that are based on this important telemetry data. So, for all of you out there who chose to send fault data from your PC to Microsoft - THANK YOU. You truly have helped, in a fundamental way, to make Windows 7 the most efficient general purpose operating system from Microsoft to date. Yeah. True story.

Enjoy.

Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Roger Barga - Introduction to Dryad and DryadLINQ

Charles — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:43:00 GMT

Microsoft Research recently announced the availability, under Academic Licensing, of Dryad, an infrastructure which allows a programmer to use the resources of a computer cluster or a data center for running data-parallel programs. A Dryad programmer can use thousands of machines, each of them with multiple processors or cores, without knowing anything about concurrent programming.

DryadLINQ is the managed high level programming abstraction used to compose Dryad vertex topology graphs that the Dryad infrastructure uses to partition parallel computations. Here, Erik Meijer and Dryad team member Roger Barga discuss Drayad and DryadLINQ at a high level so that most of us can understand the implications, history and future of Dryad. This is an introductory piece. Erik and I will dive deep into Dryad with one of the scientists behind it in the second part of this Expert to Expert mini series on Dryad. UPDATE: The Going Deep episode on Dryad is now live.

Enjoy! This is incredible and important technology for simplifying the inherent complexity of distributed computation in the cloud. In essence, DryadLINQ enables a sequential programming experience over what will execute across potentially thousands of machines (depending upon the computational complexity of the program) concurrently. Much to learn here. Channel 9 will help teach.

Editorial note: When we discuss native code and the implementation of Dryad, the focus is on DryadLINQ not the Dryad infrastructure and low level vertex APIs, which are written in C++. Just to be clear...

Useful links:

Connect site: http://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=891

ER Website on Academic Use: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/tools/dryad.aspx

MSR Info: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/dryadlinq/

Scott Guthrie and Christian Schormann: Web Programming, Design Tools and Silverlight 3

Charles — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:35:00 GMT

Today, we announce the general availability of Silverlight 3 and the Release Candidate of Expression 3. To celebrate this momentous occasion we had a few conversations with Scott Guthrie about what it all means and where it's going.

Here, VP Scott Guthrie and Director of Program Management of Expression Blend Christian Schormann sit down with me to discuss the implications of Silverlight 3 and related tools for both developers and designers. We also discuss how it is that their teams can release versions of their software so quickly and with such high quality. How does SketchFlow work and why did we invent it? Of course, we have to talk about HTML5 since most everybody else is out there... Then, there's the notion of Silverlight running outside the context of a web browser - what does this mean, exactly and how does it work. As usual, we touch on the future...

Congratulations to the Silverlight and Expression teams. Go get the bits.

You should also watch the conversation with Scott and Laurence.

Enjoy!