Peli at RiSE

SpecExplorer: Model-Based Testing made practicable

Peli de Halleux — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:45:00 GMT

Keith Stobie, Wolfgang Grieskamp, and Nico Kicillof gave a presentation on the new version of Spec Explorer 2010 for Visual Studio. Spec Explorer is a visual tool for modeling software behavior and generating test suites from those models. Spec Explorer’s approach to model-based testing has been shown to greatly enhance productivity of test case creation, to ensure predictability of requirement coverage, and to support lifecycle management and software updates. Models are typically written in C# and controlled by a configuration language which allows to express scenarios and test purposes. Microsoft itself chose Spec Explorer as a cornerstone of the effort to validate open protocol documentation, developing more than 200 test suites validating over 40,000 requirements for networking protocols in a production environment.

Emre Kiciman and Ben Livshits - Doloto: Download Time Optimizer for Web 2.0 Apps

Peli de Halleux — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:33:00 GMT

Emre Kiciman and Ben Livshits present the ideas behind Doloto. Doloto is an AJAX application optimization tool, especially useful for large and complex Web 2.0 applications that contain a lot of code, such as Bing Maps, Hotmail, etc. Doloto analyzes AJAX application workloads and automatically performs code splitting of existing large Web 2.0 applications.

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Daryl Zuniga - Viewing Code Contracts.NET in Visual Studio

Peli de Halleux — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:59:00 GMT

Daryl Zuniga gives a fast and furious demo of the new editor extensions for Code Contracts.NET. When a developer overrides a method with Contracts, the rewritter would automatically insert the pre-conditions and post-conditions in the method body. Unfortunately, the editor is not aware of that - leaving the developer confused... Not anymore, Daryl's extension mines the Contracts on the fly and hosts them in the shiny new WPF editor of Visual Studio 2010.

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Trishul Chilimbi - Green - Energy Efficient Software

Peli de Halleux — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:17:00 GMT

Trishul Chilimbi, a researcher from RiSE talks about Green. Green enables programmers to approximate expensive functions and loops while providing statistical quality of service guarantees. By giving away a couple percents of QoS, some applications may decrease their energy consumption by as much as 20%. Watch this video to learn all the details about Green...

Green Technical Report
Green story on Microsoft Research

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Daryl Zuniga and Mike Barnett - Xml Documentation from Code Contracts for .Net

Peli de Halleux — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:55:00 GMT

Mike Barnett and Daryl Zuniga, a high school intern at RiSE, sit down to talk about Code Contracts for .NET and documentation. Daryl has been working this summer on a tool that inserts contracts elements into the Xml Documentation files generated by the C#/VB compiler. Daryl also updated the Sandcastle stylesheets so that the contracts appear in the documentation pages.

Code Contracts for .NET home page - forums
See more Channel 9 videos on Code Contracts

Update: the xml comment generation is now available for download!

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Ethan Jackson - BAM - Cloud Computing with Models

Peli de Halleux — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 22:11:00 GMT

A (very) short video with Ethan Jackson on BAM. BAM is a new approach to developing cloud applications through modeling, code synthesis, and simulation. With BAM you design applications that work in a dynamic environment with fluctuating resources. You can also check out a previous Channel9 video for more details about how things work.

BAM home page: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/ejackson/bam.aspx

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Patrice Godefroid - Automated Whitebox Fuzz Testing with SAGE

Peli de Halleux — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:29:00 GMT

Patrice Godefroid gives an overview of Automated Whitebox Fuzz Testing, a powerful testing technique applied at Microsoft through a tool called SAGE. Listen how he is working with the SAGE team to 'eradicate all buffer overrun bugs' in Windows...

Read more in this paper or this slide deck.

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Ben Livshits and Emre Kiciman - AjaxView, Performance Profiling of AJAX web sites

Peli de Halleux — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:34:00 GMT

Ben Livshits and Emre Kiciman talk about the Ajax Profiling Extensions (also known as AjaxView), a tool that allows to profile web sites using Ajax. The tool lets you investigate the performance of the client side javascript! Ben and Emre explain how the profiling works, i.e. how they instrument the javascript on the fly, collect execution traces, and so forth. They also show a really cool demo of the tool where they turn on profiling for a couple web pages, then analyze the performance directly in Visual Studio.

Ajax Profiling Extensions @msdn: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/AjaxView
AjaxView @MSR: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ajaxview/

(We have a new jingle for the RiSE videos thanks the musical talent of Tom Ball. The full track of "San Juan Strut" can be found at www.themiddlethird.org)

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Sebastian Burckhardt - Data Race Detection with CHESS

Peli de Halleux — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:31:00 GMT

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 data races, a very subtle kind of concurrency bug. You'll also learn how to drill into concurrency issues using the ChessBoard, a little application designed to drill and investigate concurrent tests.

CHESS home page: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/chess/
CHESS forums: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-us/chess/threads/

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Margus Veanes and Pavel Grigorenko - Qex - Symbolic SQL Query Exploration

Peli de Halleux — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:59:00 GMT

Margus Veanes and Pavel Grigorenko present a new exciting project: Qex. Pavel did an internship in the Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) investigating automatic data generation methods for parameterized SQL queries. In this video, he shows the result of his 3-month work. Qex translates SQL queries to logic formulas and give to our in-house constraint solver, Z3. When Z3 finds a solution, Qex translates that solution back to SQL code that can be executed in the database. This is similar to how Pex works.

Find more about Qex at http://research.microsoft.com/qex or read the technical report.

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Manuel Fahndrich and Peli de Halleux - The Synergy of Code Contracts and Pex

Peli de Halleux — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:59:00 GMT

Manuel Fähndrich and Peli de Halleux sit down for a quick coding session that shows how to use Code Contracts and Pex together. Code Contracts can be used to specify what your code should do, they get turned into runtime checks which Pex can analyse and try to find counter-examples for. This was a fun session with Manuel and really shows the synergy of the two tools/approaches.

Both tools can be downloaded from Devlabs or our academic project pages.

Code Contracts: http://research.microsoft.com/contracts
Pex: http://research.microsoft.com/pex

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Herman Venter - The Common Compiler Infrastruture goes Open Source

Peli de Halleux — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:49:00 GMT

Herman Venter announces the Common Compiler Infrastructure (CCI) as an open source project on codeplex! CCI is a set of tools and components that are useful to build compilers: readers and writers for MSIL and symbol files, and more.
You’ve may have heard and probably used different incarnations of CCI in the past: the FxCop introspection engine, ILMerge, Spec# or Code Contracts are using CCI in many ways. Now, you can use it too: just sync the sources, build it, tweak it, etc… It’s all there on codeplex at

http://ccimetadata.codeplex.com

Enjoy!
ps: Sorry for the low quality of the sound, my new microphone is on it's way...

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Ben Livshits and Ben Zorn - Heap Spraying Attack Detection with Nozzle

Peli de Halleux — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 17:11:00 GMT

Ben Livshits and Ben Zorn talk about Nozzle, a new tool to detect heap spraying attacks, a new security attack that significantly increases the exploitability of existing memory corruption errors in type unsafe applications.

Ben^2 give us a quick course on the basics of heap spraying attacks and a demo of Nozzle in action. Nozzle is a runtime monitoring tool that watches the 'health' of your browser and detects attempts of heap spraying attacks.

Nozzle: http://research.microsoft.com/nozzle
Nozzle Tech Report: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/76528/tr-2008-176.pdf

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Mike Barnett - Getting started with Code Contracts in Visual Studio 2008

Peli de Halleux — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:40:00 GMT

Mike Barnett gives a step-by-step tutorial on Code Contracts, a new way to express preconditions, postconditions and invariants in any .NET language. The contracts team have built a runtime instrumentation tool and also advanced static checkers that can understand and reason about contracts.

The Code Contracts library can be downloaded for Visual Studio 2008 from the DevLabs web site. They will be part of the .Net framework 4.0!!!

Contracts @ DevLabs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/dd491992.aspx
Contracts @ Microsoft Research: http://research.microsoft.com/contracts
Contracts forums: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/codecontracts/threads/

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Ben Zorn - Memory robustness with RobustHeap

Peli de Halleux — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 05:46:00 GMT

Ben Zorn gives an introduction to the problems of memory corruption. In particular, he talks about his work on new memory allocators that provide fault tolerance and detection of errors such as dangling pointers. Very cool whiteboard session, enjoy.

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Michal Moskal - VCC, The Verifying C Compiler

Peli de Halleux — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:25:00 GMT

Michal Moskal gives us a short introduction at the Verifying C Compiler (VCC) project. VCC is a tool that proves correctness of annotated concurrent C programs or finds problems in them. VCC extends C with design by contract features, like pre- and postcondition as well as type invariants. The current primary goal of the VCC project is to to verify Microsoft Hyper-V. Hyper-V is a hypervisor -- a thin layer of software that sits just above the hardware and beneath one or more operating systems. The Hypervisor verification project is a cooperation between European Microsoft Innovation Center in Aachen, Germany the RiSE group at Microsoft Research in Redmond and the Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany.

VCC slide deck, get the high-level picture and more details,
VCC home page, all you want to know.
Unfortunately, there is currently no download available of VCC.

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Ethan Jackson - Specifying Cloud Applications

Peli de Halleux — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:03:00 GMT

Today we talk with Ethan Jackson about Cloud applications.

Cloud applications are web-based distributed systems deployed over a fluctuating set of computing nodes and services. The design of cloud applications is particularly challenging because few assumptions can be made about the connectivity of nodes, the availability of services, and the long-term evolution of the computing fabric. Ethan describes a new approach to architecting cloud applications. His approach gives developers a powerful set of abstractions that they can use to engineer systems beyond a client-server architecture, while understanding the behavior of their applications in a cloud environment. This is part 1, where we introduce the basic concepts on the whiteboard.

BAM project home page

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Getting started with Pex in Visual Studio 2008

Peli de Halleux — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:38:00 GMT

Nikolai Tillmann and Peli de Halleux give a short tutorial on Pex, an automated white box testing tool for .Net. The tutorial is a pair-programming session where they show us how to get started with Pex in Visual Studio, starting from an (untested) piece of C# code:

how to use Pex to explore the behavior of any method in your code,
how to save the exploration results into a unit test suite,
how to improve the generated parameterized unit tests to leverage Pex code exploration engine.

If you want to follow up the steps on your machine as well,

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Madan Musuvathi - Getting started with CHESS in Visual Studio 2008

Peli de Halleux — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:40:00 GMT

Today we are sitting with Madan Musuvathi for a quick tutorial on writing concurrency unit tests, powered by CHESS in Visual Studio 2008. Madan goes through a simple bank account example that contains a subtle concurrency bug. He shows how to turn a unit test into a concurrent unit test in a snap, find concurrency issues and debug them using CHESS.

CHESS is an automated concurrency testing tool for .NET and Win32 that finds and reproduces heisenbugs.

Ask questions in the forum

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Nachi Nagappan - Experimental study about Test Driven Development

Peli de Halleux — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:59:00 GMT

This week, we dropped by Nachi Nagappan in the Empirical Software Engineering area. Nachi does studies on what works and does not work in software development using metrics.

We talk with him about Test Driven Development: Does it work better? How better? What's the catch?
To answer these questions, Nachi talks about a study done over multiple teams within and outside of Microsoft on TDD. The results are very interesting, as they are based on real teams with real products, so I definitely encourage you to watch the video or download the paper to grok the numbers in details.

Download the high-quality screencast from Downloads -> Screencast.
Download the full article on the TDD study at http://research.microsoft.com/ESM/ (Paper title: Realizing quality improvement through test driven development: results and experiences of four industrial teams).

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

RiSE at the Principles of Programming Languages' 09

Peli de Halleux — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 00:10:00 GMT

Several RiSE researchers will present their latest joint work at the upcoming Principles of Programming Languages (POPL'09) conference (non RiSE authors are marked with *):

Tayfun Elmas*, Shaz Qadeer, and Serdar Tasiran will present: A Calculus of Atomic Actions.
Daan Leijen will present Flexible types: Robust type inference for first-class polymorphism [pdf].
Sumit Gulwani, Krishna Mehra* and Trishul Chilimbi will present SPEED: Precise and Efficient Static Estimation of Program Computational Complexity.
Sumit Gulwani, Tal Lev-Ami* and Mooly Sagiv* will present: A Combination Framework for Tracking Partition Sizes.
Jeremy Condit *, Brian Hackett*, Shuvendu Lahiri, and Shaz Qadeer will present: Unifying Type Checking and Property Checking for Low-Level Code.

Enjoy your reading!

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

The RiSE of Research in Software Engineering

Peli de Halleux — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:25:00 GMT

Wolfram Schulte introduces us to the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group.

The RiSE group will start publishing weekly videos on Channel9. The videos will not only describe tools or technologies the researchers are working on, but they will also explain how the tools work through 'classroom' videos.

To stay tuned to upcoming videos, register to the RiSE RSS feed at http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/rise/RSS/

For more information about RiSE, check out our home page at http://research.microsoft.com/rise.

This is my first video shoot for Channel9, still learning the cameran's magic.

RiSE at Patterns and Practices Summit

Peli de Halleux — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:52:00 GMT

On Nov 5th, from 6:00 - 7:30 PM MSDN Magazine hosted an evening with Microsoft Research and Wolfram Schulte.

RiSE at PDC 2008

Peli de Halleux — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:44:00 GMT

The Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) from Microsoft Research had a strong presence at PDC 2008 with 3 booths, 4 sessions and 2 panels. Here is the list of talks that you can watch online on Channel9:

BAM, Doloto, AjaxView: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL50/
CHESS: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL58/
Code Contracts and Pex: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL51/
Task Parallel Library: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL26/
Future of Programming Languages: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL57/
Future of Unit Testing: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL61/

CHESS interviewed by Mary-Jo Foley

Peli de Halleux — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:15:00 GMT

CHESS gets interviewed by Marie-Jo Foley. Read the full article at http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1648.

CHESS is an automated tool for finding errors in multithreaded software by systematic exploration of thread schedules. More info at http://research.microsoft.com/chess .