going deep - Channel 9

Inside C# 4.0: dynamic typing, optional parameters, covariance and contravariance

Charles — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:28:00 GMT

C# Program Manager Mads Torgersen and C# compiler developers Eric Lippert, Chris Burrows, Samuel Ng discuss (and whiteboard) the details inside C# 4.0's dynamic type, optional parameters and default parameter values, and new support for COM interop (should make Office developers giddy). Samuel, Chris and Eric were very busy solving some really hard problems to pull these new features off. It's great to learn about these new features from the people who actually implemented them. Classic Channel 9!

So, how does C# 4.0's dynamic type work, exactly? What does "more COM friendly" really mean? Covariance and Contravariance? Optional parameters with default values and parameter re-ordering? Why? How? Tune in.

Enjoy!

(my apologizes for the slight glitch at the middle of the interview. My camera bluescreened! Fortunately, data captured before the system failure was stored successfuly, but a little tiny piece of the conversation was lost)

Dharma Shukla: Inside Live Framework

Charles — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:47:00 GMT

Dharma Shukla, Architect for the Live Framework, knows how to make developers happy. After delivering the programming model for the Workflow Foundation, he joined the Live Services team to develop a unified, simple and open way for developers to program against the full set of Live Services – from any device, any platform, client or cloud. We sat down with Dharma to understand the hard problems he set out to solve, and the approach he took building the Live Operating Environment and Live Framework

Mark Russinovich: Inside Windows 7

Charles — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:15:00 GMT

How has Windows evolved, as a general purpose operating system and at the lowest levels, in Windows 7? Who better to talk to than Technical Fellow and Windows Kernel guru Mark Russinovich? Here, Mark enlightens us on the new kernel constructs in Windows 7 (and, yeah, we do wander up into user mode, but only briefly). One very important change in the Windows 7 kernel is the dismantling of the dispatcher spin lock and redesign and implementation of its functionality. This great work was done by Arun Kishan (you've met him here on C9 last year). The direct result of the reworking of the dispatcher spin lock is that Windows 7 can scale to 256 processors. Further, this enabled the great Landy Wang to tune the Windows Memory Manager to be even more efficient than it already is. Mark also explains (again) what MinWin really is (heck, even I was confused. Not anymore...). MinWin is present in Windows 7. Native support for VHD (boot from VHD anyone?) is another very cool addition to our next general purpose OS. Yes, and there's more!

Tune in. This is a great conversation (if you're into operating systems). It's always great to chat with Mark.

Dave Campbell: Inside SQL Services

Charles — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:58:00 GMT

Technical Fellow Dave Campbell digs into the "fabric" of Azure's SQL Services. What are the current capabilities of SQL Services and how will they evolve? Can you upload stored procedures to the cloud and expect them to run? What does extending a shrink-wrapped application to the world of distributed cloud services really mean? Listen in. Learn.

Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Bart De Smet - LINQ-to-Anything

Charles — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:31:00 GMT

Welcome to the 100th episode of Going Deep! It's been a great ride so far and I hope you've been enjoying the show over the years. For this momentous occasion, meet Bart de Smet, a software engineer extraordinaire on the WPF team who spends his free time blogging (what an incredible wealth of truly useful technical information to be found on Bart's blog!) and creating custom LINQ providers. In fact, Bart is probably the world's most prolific LINQ provider creator, from LINQ-to-MSI to LINQ-to-Simpsons! How does he do it???

Of course, in this special episode who better to have involved in this LINQ'ified conversation (with lots of whiteboarding) than LINQ co-creator, programming languages designer, fundamentalist functional programming high priest and Channel 9 star Erik Meijer? In fact, given that this is an Expert to Expert Going Deep, Erik co-conducts the interview (and he's great at it as usual!). Nothing better than watching and listening to two experts geeking out at a whiteboard!

What makes LINQ so readily "providable"? How does Bart concoct his LINQ provider magic? Here, we dig into the details that enable LINQ-to-Anything.

Tune in. There's a lot of very useful technical information here (which I hope is the case for all 100 Going Deep episodes).

Enjoy and thanks for watching!

Building Channel 9: Inside EvNet - Part 2

Charles — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:59:00 GMT

EvNet, which is the codebase that powers all of our channels, was written from the ground up. How is the codebase designed? What's the architecure? What did each developer work on? What were some of the challenges? Who are these dev geniuses, anyway? This is part two of the great conversation with the awesome folks who build and innovate Channel 9 (and several other web sites). Tune in.

Part 1:

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Building-Channel-9-Inside-EvNet-Part-1/

Building Channel 9: Inside EvNet - Part 1

Charles — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:52:00 GMT

You asked. We deliver. Meet the developers behind Channel 9 (and 8, 10, Edge and MicrosoftPDC.com). Mike Samspon, Erik Porter, Duncan Mackenzie and Nathan Heskew are the super talented devs who built C9 V4. Unlike the older versions of Channel 9, V4 is a completely new codebase. Gone are the days of stitching together half-baked technologies (though, they did scale and Bryn and I deserve some credit for that! ).

EvNet, which is the codebase that powers all of our channels, was written from the ground up. How is the codebase designed? What's the architecure? What did each developer work on? What were some of the challenges? Who are these dev geniuses, anyway? This is part one of the great conversation with the folks who build and innovate Channel 9. Tune in.

Enjoy.

Part 2:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Building-Channel-9-Inside-EvNet-Part-2/

John Sheehan: Inside Application Virtualization

Charles — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:41:00 GMT

Application virtualization is different than machine virtualization which virtualizes the machine on which an operating system (and applications) are installed. Machine virtualization provides an abstraction layer between the hardware and the OS that's running on top of it. It also allows managing and simultaneously operating multiple environments on a single machine.

Application virtualization takes this concept and applies it to programs. The abstraction layer created by application virtualization lies between the operating system and the applications that run within it, allowing applications to be delivered dynamically as services that can be added or removed without installation.

Microsoft purchased a company named Softricity a while ago and the application virtualization product SoftGrid was forged from the algorithms created by both Softricity and Microsoft engineers.

Marketing says:

"Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization provides the most extensive virtualization on the market. In addition to virtualizing application related Windows Services, it virtualizes per user, per application instance, key application components including the Registry, file system, DLLs, COM/IPC, .INI files, fonts and more.

SoftGrid's application virtualization can work in concert with other virtualization technologies – including machine virtualization – as part of a comprehensive services-oriented architecture."

Here, John Sheehan, the primary architect of SoftGrid (formerly the chief architect of Softricity) digs into the details of how application virtualization (as implemented in SoftGrid) works. It's an incredibly interesting technology with a very promising future. There are many possibilities for using application virtualization to solve problems affecting not only the enterprise, but standard users and developers as well. Just use your imagination. This is a deep dive and John told me he'd like to go even deeper next time he's in Redmond. For now, this conversation should suffice as a technical introduction to the world of application virtualization and how Microsoft is innovating in this space.

Enjoy!

STL Iterator Debugging and Secure SCL

Charles — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:28:00 GMT

The Visual C++ runtime library now detects incorrect iterator use and will assert and display a dialog box at run time. To enable debug iterator support, a program must be compiled with a debug version of a C run time library (see C Run-Time Libraries for more information).

See Checked Iterators for more information on using iterators.

The C++ standard describes which member functions cause iterators to a container to become invalid. Two examples are:

Erasing an element from a container causes iterators to the element to become invalid.
Increasing the size of a vector (push or insert) causes iterators into the vector container become invalid.

Here, VC++ Software Engineer Stephan T. Lavavej digs into the details of STL Iterator Debugging including its implementation, usage scenarios and interesting facts you may not find anywhere else (Channel 9 goodness). Stephan is known as STL (this is his name's acronym, by coincidence or perhaps it's simply prophetic since Stephan is a passionate advocate for STL, as you will no doubt understand after watching and listening to this conversation). Stephan also dives a bit into Secure SCL, which is part of the VC++ Safe Libraries.

Stephan does not possess a marketing bone in his body as you can tell by his commentary that's weaved into his informal presentation of advanced topics. I love this. He speaks his mind freely, though with fairness, and that's the only way to be.

Enjoy!

Inside Parallel Extensions for .NET 2008 CTP Part 2

Charles — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:33:00 GMT

In addition to CDS, this upgrade provides several improvements, including a new scheduler that is more robust, efficient, and scalable. TPL also exposes new functionality, including methods for continuations. PLINQ now runs on top of TPL, clarifies order-preservation, and provides several new operators.

The June CTP works with the .NET Framework 3.5 as a simple, small-footprint installation that drops a single DLL, documentation, samples, and registers the DLL with Visual Studio 2008.

Here, we continue the discussion with the key engineers of the Microsoft Parallel Computing Platform (which includes the Parallel Extensions for .NET...): Lead Developer Joe Duffy, Developer Huseyin Yildiz, Developer Igor Ostrovsky. Program Manager Stephen Toub and Program Manager Ed Essey.

We dig deeply into a lot of topics related to parallelism and conconcurency and how the new additions to the platform enable developers to exploit multi/many core processors in an elegant way.

Enjoy part 2. See part 1 here.

Inside Parallel Extensions for .NET 2008 CTP Part 1

Charles — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:06:00 GMT

Parallel Extensions simplifies development by providing library-based support for introducing concurrency into applications written with any .NET language, including C# and Visual Basic. It includes the Task Parallel Library (TPL), which provides imperative data and task parallelism; Parallel LINQ (PLINQ), which provides declarative data parallelism; and all new Coordination Data Structures (CDS), which provide support for work coordination and managing shared state.

In addition to CDS, this upgrade provides several improvements, including a new scheduler that is more robust, efficient, and scalable. TPL also exposes new functionality, including methods for continuations. PLINQ now runs on top of TPL, clarifies order-preservation, and provides several new operators.

The June CTP works with the .NET Framework 3.5 as a simple, small-footprint installation that drops a single DLL, documentation, samples, and registers the DLL with Visual Studio 2008.

Here, we meet some of the key engineers of the Microsoft Parallel Computing Platform (which includes the Parallel Extensions for .NET...): Lead Developer Joe Duffy, Developer Huseyin Yildiz, Developer Igor Ostrovsky, Program Manager Stephen Toub and Program Manager Ed Essey.

We dig deeply into a lot of topics related to parallelism and conconcurency and how the new additions to the platform enable developers to exploit multi/many core processors in an elegant way.

Enjoy part 1. Part 2 is here.

Expert to Expert: Contract Oriented Programming and Spec#

Charles — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:27:52 GMT

The Spec# programming system is a new attempt at a more cost effective way to develop and maintain high-quality software. Spec# is pronounced "Spec sharp" and can be written (and searched for) as the "specsharp" or "Spec# programming system". The Spec# system consists of:

The Spec# programming language. Spec# is an extension of the object-oriented language C#. It extends the type system to include non-null types and checked exceptions. It provides method contracts in the form of pre- and postconditions as well as object invariants.

The Spec# compiler. Integrated into the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment for the .NET platform, the compiler statically enforces non-null types, emits run-time checks for method contracts and invariants, and records the contracts as metadata for consumption by downstream tools.

The Spec# static program verifier. This component (codenamed Boogie) generates logical verification conditions from a Spec# program. Internally, it uses an automatic theorem prover that analyzes the verification conditions to prove the correctness of the program or find errors in it.

A unique feature of the Spec# programming system is its guarantee of maintaining invariants in object-oriented programs in the presence of callbacks, threads, and inter-object relationships.

The Spec# programming system is being developed as a research project at Microsoft Research in Redmond, primarily by the Programming Languages and Methods group.

Here, Expert to Expert guest expert and programming language guru Erik Meijer chats with MSR researchers and spec# designers Wolfram Schulte, Rustan Leino and Peter Mueller. We dig into the details of Spec# and contract oriented programming in general. Plenty of code on the screen and lots of deep conversation. Just how we like it for Going Deep and Expert to Expert.

Enjoy!

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Russell Hadley: The Route to C++ Code Optimization

Charles — Tue, 20 May 2008 18:43:14 GMT

It's nice to write clean code (code that looks good, is organized, is easy for others to understand by reading it, etc). As developers we get to use great tools to implement algorithms in our favorite languages. The act of composing a program is much like that of writing a story or, in some cases, a poem :) But the underlying hardware isn't much interested in intelligent class hierachies and easy-to-understand lines of programming language syntax. Processors do not speak C++ or Java or C# or VB, etc.

The focus of this interview is mapping the (long and complicated)path to executable machine code that the machine natively understands and acts upon, bringing your code to life. How does this work, exactly?

Russell Hadley is a senior developer on the C++ team here at Microsoft and he spends his days (and nights, ocassionally) writing code that takes the front-end compilation linear (flattened) blob and turns it into highly optimized machine code patterns that the processor can execute in a highly efficient manner.

This is a deep interview with lots of whiteboarding, but it is shallow enough so you won't drown if you can't swim very well. Enjoy. This is another great conversation with one of the C++ experts who live in Building 41.

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FeedSync: Synchronizing the Mesh

Dan — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:30:46 GMT

Synch is one of those things that sounds much, much, much simpler than it actually is ;) Live Mesh is built with synchronization as a core primitive – every object in the system is synch-enabled, and cloud and client runtimes manage the notification and synchronization process. We sat down with Steven Lees, designer of the FeedSync protocol, and Steve Garrity, Akash Sagar and Vlad Fedorov from the Live Platform Services team, for a detailed review of how synch works in the Live Mesh platform and experience.

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Abolade Gbadegesin: Live Mesh Architecture

Dan — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 03:58:56 GMT

Live Mesh integrates a smart client with a services cloud to make your files, devices and social mesh available wherever you are. Developing it required solving two of the hardest problems around – building scalable and cost-efficient services, and developing a robust synch model with a local client API. We sat down with architect Abolade Gbadegesin to hear what approach he took to designing Live Mesh.

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For more information, go to Mesh.com.

For more Live Mesh coverage:
- Watch the interview with Channel 10

Dan Reed: On the ManyCore Future and Parallelism in the Sky

Charles — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:42:12 GMT

Dan Reed is Microsoft's Director of Scalable/Multi-Core Systems Research and head of the recently formed Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC): one at the University of California at Berkeley (UC-Berkeley) and a second at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Since we've been here) but part of the same wide-angle general purpose solution to the complex (and arguably fractal) general problem that spans microblips in DRAM to massive data centers.

Certainly the computation Cloud of the future must not only be scalable and highly performant, but also adaptive and homeostatic in how it reacts to frequent perturbation.

What are some of the challenges on the server side with respect to concurrent processing and massive scalability? Clustered server computing environments have traditionally been very good at parallel computation (compared to the general purpose client) so what's Dan and Microsoft working on to ensure our Cloud scales to ManyCore? Is machine learning being incorporated into clustered computing software adaptation and evolution?

Dan has a very interesting biography:

"Previously, I was the founding director of the Renaissiance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina, the Chancellor's Eminent Professor, and Senior Advisor for Strategy and Innovation. Before that, I was head of the Department of Computer Science, Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor, and Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.
I am also a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and chair of the Computing Research Association (CRA)"

Dan was the head of CS at Illinois during the birth of the web browser Mosaic which changed the way people interact with the Internet forever... We talk about where the web is today (including browsers) versus what Mosaic enabled when it arrived.

Enjoy. This is another great discussion with a supercomputing stalwart whose main focus these days is on ensuring we are prepared for the highly parallel future of general purpose computation in the sky.

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Andy Ayers: Understanding the Phoenix Compiler Framework

Charles — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:19:36 GMT

The compiler gurus over in CTP of the Phoenix Compiler Framework. It's been a while since we've learned about Phoenix here on Channel 9 so we thought it necessary to find out what's going on with the soon-to-be de facto compiler technology for all of Microsoft's products.

Andy Ayers is an Architect on the Phoenix team. He sits down with us to dig into the details of Phoenix and address it's current state, history and future (no whiteboarding here, but this is still quite deep. There is a cool demo at the end of the interview.) . It's very interesting to note that the Phoenix team has tested the scalability and power of their pluggable (extensible) compiler framework on the likes of Windows. Turns out Phoenix handles such a large task (compiling Windows) very well. This new compiler technology has been designed with many-core in mind. This means Phoenix is our most parallelized compiler which adds up to shorter compilation time. As usual, the C++ team is ahead of the curve when it comes to preparing for the concurrent future.

Tune in and learn all about the future of Microsoft's compiler technology from one of the minds behind it all. The future is very bright indeed!

Enjoy!

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Brian Beckman: Project Quark - A New Beginning for Quantum Computing Rises from the Ashes of Theoret

Charles — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:58:15 GMT

Software Architect and Astrophysicist Brian Beckman has a new job at Microsoft. No longer working with Erik Meijer on cutting edge developer tools and programming languages, Brian has joined a very small team of distinguished engineers and technical fellows that seeks to create a new product for Microsoft, code named Quark.

Brian and his big brained colleagues have produced a prototype quantum computing device that takes the notion of parallel computation to a whole new level... The really interesting thing here is that Brian has determined that theoretical phyiscs has completed. What does that mean, you ask? Well, only Dr. Beckman can explain it in terms that everybody will be able to comprehend.

Tune in. This is very big news. Computing will never be the same thanks to Brian and his colleagues working in the newly formed (and apt-named!) Quantum Unreality Computation Group.

Enjoy.

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Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Bertrand Meyer - Objects, Contracts, Concurrency, Sleeping Barbers

Charles — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:32:29 GMT

Bertrand Meyer is a programming language guru, computer scientist and arguably the uncle of object oriented programming :). Bertrand created the Eiffel programming language. Eiffel is an object-oriented language that is based on a fixed set of powerful principles like Design by Contract and Command-Query Separation. It's a very powerful language that has impacted the evolution of the more popular general purpose OO languages such as Java and C#.

With the arrival of multi-core and soon-to-arrive many-core chipsets concurrency and parallelism are top-of-mind for general purpose language designers these days. Bertrand has introduced the SCOOP model on top of Eiffel. SCOOP is a comprehensive effort to make concurrent and distributed programming simple and safe, taking advantages of Eiffel's object technology and Design by Contract.

General purpose programming language designer and passionate functional programmig advocate Erik Meijer leads the discussion in this addition of Expert to Expert. You all know great tools for software developers.

Very special guest star and famous mathematical logician Yuri Gurevich joins us for the first half of the conversation (He happened to be in Bertrand's office when we arrived - very lucky for us indeed! :)).

This is a long conversation that I hope you eenjoy as much as I do. Find yourself some quality time to listen and learn from this chat amongst some the world's finest programming thinkers.

Enjoy!

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