charles

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.

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.

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: 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!

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.

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!

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).

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!

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

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.

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.

Useful Links:
Product Overview
CTP Download
Submit Feedback
MSDN Forums
Team Blog
Webinars

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

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 (Watch this Screencast for Demo):

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 (Watch this Screencast for demo):

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.