Rick Rashid: Leading Microsoft into the Future with Research

well, I dont know. I think MSR is falling short in some ways.
 
VMWare has got the load balancing of their VMs working better than what MS has. Has MSR been doing VM research? 

Was MSR instrumental in  .NET and managed code? The C9 interviews with Anders imply that when he ( Anders ) arrived at the company in the late 1990s, MS had little in terms of knowing what the followup to COM should be.

Computer useability.  That is something MSR should be working on, no? As is it, as someone who is a programmer, I am terrified of having to config active directory, sql server, IIS, network connectivity on my home office network.  Where is the software agent I can dispatch onto my network with instructions to config things so that user X, working from PC Y, can have authority level whatever to the Z database? ( actually, I should be able to write that, so stand down  )

In practical terms, in .NET I can only code in C# or VB. If I like C# but would like to add 10 or so additional features, I have to go back to square one and write an entirely new language.  And then there is all the work for fitting your C-better language into VS and the interactive debugger. Is MSR working on a computer language that can be defined as a base class for a new language? Where the C-better langauge could be written by removing and adding features to the base C# language.

Back to VM, is MSR working on what I think is called grid computing? VM load balancing falls down in that the entire OS and all its running processes have to be moved enmass to the underutilized server.  Better to be able to move a single process to another server. Where the OS is running not just on multiple cores, but on multiple servers.  That would be one sophisticated thread pool! 

Check out this recent post on the framework.aspnet newsgroup: 
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet/browse_frm/thread/62463bd993e98333/?hl=en##

esp this message:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet/msg/6452dab213d47e7a?hl=en&&

and the response:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet/msg/de6f096d70c5fba8?hl=en&&

as I understand it, the experts were advising to run IIS on a different server than the domain controller. The OP said it is nuts that to host a secure website from his basement he should have to run at least two servers.  If the answer is multiple VMs running on a dual or quad core server, that addresses the need for excess hardware to run MSFT software.  But where is MSR in its basic OS research making it so that processes can be securely isolated from each other?  The task of configing multiple OSes, each in its own VM, seems more cumbersome than dealing with a single robust OS running all of your servers.

dont get me wrong. I enjoyed the interview. Where is our man Rory?

-Steve Richter