Entries tagged with clr - Channel 9

E2E: Erik Meijer and Patrick Dussud - Inside Garbage Collection

Charles — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Patrick Dussud is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft who is the author of .NET's garbage collector (GC) - the automatic memory management infrastructure that makes up most of what is managed in managed code execution. How does GC, work, generally? Why is it important? The GC inside of the CLR is of a specfic type - ephemeral, concurrent (the server version has always been concuurent and now with Background GC on the client in CLR 4, GC is concurrent on the client as well, but there are differences...).

Patrick takes us through the basics of GC up to the current state of the art in this outstanding conversation with one of the fathers of .NET. Of course, given the other expert in the room - programming language designer Erik Meijer, we have to talk about the impact that dynamic and functional languages have on the design of general purpose GCs as well as future directions of the CLR's GC, generally. What's Patrick working on these days?

Patrick will be presenting at PDC09 in the the Technical Leaders track. His talk, Future of GC, should not be missed. This conversation is a great introduction to what Patrick will be talking about and we highly recommend you watch this before you attend his session (or watch his session after the show shortly after the PDC ends - like last year, all sessions will be available on-demand...).

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! :)

Ian Carmichael: The History and Future of the CLR

Charles — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:18:00 GMT

Ian Carmichael has been working on the CLR team since before Microsoft came up with the .NET branding for our managed platform and the virtual machine that powers it all, the Common Language Runtime. Well, we're getting close to the third major release of the CLR, CLR 4 (V3 was really a service or minor release, but who's counting?).

Back in the good old days prior to V1, Ian was an engineer and a peer of Chris Brumme, Vance Morrison and other top of the line engineers working through the architecture, design and implementation of the CLR. Now, Ian is the GM of CLR and he's at the helm plotting out the course for CLR's future. Necessarily, we had to sit down with him to pick his brain about CLR then, now and tomorrow. Tune in. Get a glimpse into the past and future of the CLR from somebody who's been deeply involved with the advent and evolution of Microsoft's now ubiquitous managed runtime.

Raja Krishnaswamy and Jesse Kaplan: CLR 4 - Inside No-PIA

Charles — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:43:00 GMT

Principal Architect Raja Krishnaswamy, Program Manager Jesse Kaplan and team have created a new way to streamline and simplfiy PIA-based COM Interop: rather than including an entire PIA (Primary Interop Assembly) in your application to utilize the functionality of a few of its member classes, with CLR 4 you are able, via type embedding and type equivalence, to include only the objects you need which has the pleasant side effect of decreasing the size of your application and making it much easier for you to update without relying on a new PIA version from some third party (like Microsoft Office, for a canonical example). How does this work, exactly? Does this mean that PIAs are no longer required? How does versioning in this scenario work, exactly? Let's learn all about the thinking behind the thinking of this new CLR enabled feature, No-PIA.

You will learn, in great detail, about Type Equivalence in a soon to be released conversation with Raja and Vance Morrison. For now, wrap your head around No-PIA. Raja and Jesse are great at explaining complexity in simple to understand ways.

No-PIA in CLR 4 is the beginning of something very, very useful (consider the non-interop scenario (managed to managed) for a moment. Fascinating, Captain.)

Enjoy!

CLR 4: Debugging and Profiling API Enhancements

Charles — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:07:00 GMT

Developers Thomas Lai and David Broman join Program Manager Jon Langdon to share with us some of the new debugging and profiling enhancements in CLR 4. They've done a lot work in the upcoming release and besides evolving debugging and profilining capabilities and semantics (APIs), they've implemented (or fixed) many things customers have been asking for.

The managed debugging and profiling story with CLR 4 is based on a new core architecture (they are moving to an out of process model which means you'll be able to debug multiple threads rather than being stuck to the same thread(s) attached to the main context. Something like that. Watch, listen, learn.).

Tune in to learn about some of the design decisions made to support moving out-of-proc, improving debugger and profiling reliability, enhanced core APIs, future directions and meet some of the people who design and implement these important engineering components for the managed (.NET) world.

Enjoy.

Vance Morrison: CLR Through the Years

Charles — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:48:00 GMT

CLR Architect Vance Morrison has been very busy working on the future of the CLR, especially as it relates to execution performance and the type system. Some of his latest work is present in the upcoming 4th version of the virtual machine that powers all things .NET, CLR 4, which ships with Visual Studio 2010. Vance has been on the CLR team since its inception. MSIL, the intermediate language produced by the compilers of all .NET languages, is primarily Vance's doing.

Here, Vance guides us through some of the history of the CLR, a look inside the upcoming version and some insights into the future. One of the things that Vance is thinking about with respect to type inheritance is what he calls default interfaces: they are contractual, but with default implementation characteristics, as opposed to purely abstract as interfaces are today. So, a default(implementation) interface is capabe of changing without breaking the systems that implement it. Wait a minute, that' goes against the basic rules of interfaces in the OO world. Vance explains. Relax.

Meet Vance, the face of MSIL. There's much of his thinking and code inside the CLR. Learn about some this here. Tune in.

Enjoy.

John Rose: Static Runtimes and Dynamic Byte Codes

Charles — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:17:00 GMT

John Rose is a virtual machine expert who's been working on the Java Virtual Machine for several years. He's part of the team that is adding multi-language support to the JVM, specifically, dynamic language support. How does the multi-dynamic-language support mechanism work, exactly, inside the statically typed JVM? What are some of the basic problems faced by VMs that must support both static and dynamic languages? The JVM, like the CLR, has a baked in static type system. What hurdles did this create for John and team and have they jumped them?

Tune in.

Scott Guthrie: Inside Silverlight 3

Charles — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:12:00 GMT

Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, leads the teams that create the .NET developer and designer technologies and tools. Silverlight 3 has arrived in beta form. Expression 3 also ships today in Preview form. Grab the bits and play. Provide feedback. OK. That's the housekeeping stuff. Now, on to this conversation with Scott. We talk about many things in this interview and weave the deeply technical view on Silverlight 3 with more surface level perspectives. So, if you're looking for bite size marketing messages, this video isn't for you :)

What are the significant changes/improvements/inventions in Silverlight 3? Silverlight 2 brought the world a cross platfrom CLR. How has the CLR changed in Silverlight 3? Silverlight 3 enables Silverlight to run outside the context of a browser. What does this mean, exactly? Silverlight and Many-Core? What has the significant real world feedback been like regarding Silverlight 2 and how has it helped shape Silverlight 3? How do you work with the Moonlight folks, exactly (see Miguel's perspective on this as well)? And much, much more. This is a typically long Charles interview and we travel around The Gu's globe of knowledge (which is vast - he's an engineer at heart).

Thank you, Scott, for spending so much of your valuable time for a Channel 9 interview that should prove most interesting to many folks who watch and listen.

Enjoy!

Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Charles — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:16:00 GMT

It's always a pleasure to get a chance to sit down and geek out with Anders Hejlsberg. Anders is a Microsoft Technical Fellow (a Technical Fellow is the highest ranking technical position at Microsoft) and programming language design master. He's the creator of C# and one of the founders of .NET. Anders is an expert language design craftsman. C# is one of the most popular languages Microsoft has created and certainly the most widely used language by developers who target the .NET platform.

Erik Meijer, Expert to Expert host, programming language designer and occasionally-radical category theoritician, has spent many years working with Anders and the C# team. As you may know, Erik has been a key contributor to the addition of functional constructs to C#.

Here, Erik and Anders wax on topics ranging from the design of C# 4.0's dynamic keyword (what's the thinking behind the thinking) to the potential near and far future of the C# language (and general purpose imperative programming, generally). Anders also spends some time at the whiteboard explaining C# 4.0's support for covariance and contravariance. Of course, we can't forget about concurrency and parallelism, so we don't.

As you might expect, the conversation takes some interesting jaunts into various programming language design rabbit holes. For example, Anders discusses the notion of creating a new language to support new problem domains versus extending current languages to meet the needs of developers who need to express solutions to complex problems (so, how do you make a language like C# more dynamic in the sense that it can readily help developers solve problems that the language was not initially designed to solve?). We talk about the work being done on a service-oriented C# compiler (compiler as a service), C# as an ESDL container (or as an EDSL itself to be hosted in other environments...) and much more. This is a fantastic conversation with some of Microsoft's true visionaries. Enjoy.

New sessions announced for MIX09

Charles — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:41:00 GMT

New sessions have just been announced for MIX09. Some of the ones I find most interesting are:

Building Microsoft Silverlight Applications with Eclipse
Come learn about plug-in support in Silverlight 2, and how to build a typical Silverlight-based application using the Silverlight tools for Eclipse.

Deep Dive into Microsoft Silverlight Graphics
Come hear about the Silverlight 3 rendering pipeline, and learn how to enhance your application experience with the latest additions to the Silverlight graphics APIs.

Going Inside Microsoft Silverlight: Exploring the Core CLR
See how the CLR team slimmed down the size of the runtime into a small, zippy download, the Core CLR, yet kept the experience .NET developers have come to love.

Live Framework and Mesh Services: Live Services for Developers
Learn about the Live Framework including new and future services (such as Mesh Services), protocols, APIs, and tools which enable your Web, service, or client applications to access, store, and synchronize user data with Live Services, obtain audience analytics data, and more.

Mesh-Enabled Web Applications
Come learn how to extend your existing Web applications and get them to live and breathe within Live Mesh. See how Mesh-enabled Web applications can be accessed from anywhere through a Web browser as well as run locally (and offline) on a user's desktop. Also see how Web applications can take full advantage of value-add Mesh services such as a dedicated sandbox, online and offline synchronized storage, automatic application updates, identity, application catalog, social computing, and more.

In other MIX news... The great Robert Hess, Cocktail Master and Demo Guru, chats about the scenes behind the scenes of putting on a conference like MIX. Interesting indeed. Much work goes into pulling off an event like MIX.

VIEWS Sample File

Jared Bienz — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:32:31 GMT

This post includes the files for the Virtual Earth Mapping in Silverlight with VIEWS screencast.

Virtual Earth Mapping in Silverlight with VIEWS

Jared Bienz — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:25:00 GMT

VIEWS (the Virtual Earth Wrapper for Silverlight) provides a fully managed wrapper around Virtual Earth for Silverlight applications. VIEWS has its roots in Microsoft Research but now lives as an open source project on CodePlex. Join us for a quick lap around VIEWS and learn how you can add mapping to your applications without getting deep into JavaScript.

Download: Sample Files

John Lam and Martin Maly: Deep DLR

Charles — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:03:04 GMT

Dynamic languages are becoming more popular than ever. Static runtimes (static type system is baked into the machine) like the CLR do not natively support languages that have no requirement for explicit types. Implementing languages of this class on the CLR is a rather complicated and arduous task. Some very clever folks like Program Manager, RubyCLR creator and IronRuby team member John Lam and Senior Software Developer Martin Maly (creator of the LOLCode programming language implementation that runs on the DLR, but more importantly one of the devs who writes the DLR) are on the team that makes implementing dynamic languages that can run on top of the CLR not only possible but easier than one might expect. This is made possible with a new managed virtual machine called the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). The DLR runs on top of the CLR, but you can think of the DLR as it's own managed runtime (or virtual machine). For this interview, it is assumed that you have working knowledge of what the CLR does.

This interview focuses deeply on one core question: How does the DLR work. Of course, we talk about the history and future of the DLR, but primarily we find out about DLR nuts and bolts and architecure.

This interview is whiteboard heavy and compelling. It was really fun to chat with John and Martin and geek out on the DLR. It is a great technology with a very bright future.

Enjoy!

Low res file here.

Charles Nutter and Wayne Kelly: Making Ruby Run on Static Virtual Machines - JRuby(JVM) and Ruby.NET

Charles — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:28:13 GMT

At Lang.NET 2008, I caught up with two dynamic languages afficianados who have been working on a similar (and really hard)problem over the years: getting Ruby (a dynamic language) to run on a static virtual machine (JVM and CLR, respectived).

Charles Nutter is a lead developer on the JRuby project which aims to run Ruby "natively' on the JVM. Wayne Kelly is the lead developer on the now defunct Ruby.NET project (it's been merged into the IronRuby project so Wayne and team's great work has not gone with the wind...) which aimed to get Ruby to run on the CLR.

Both Charles and Wayne are challanged by the same technical hurdles: Running dynamic code in a statically-typed environment with no support for continuations. This is really challenging and is the primary reason that Microsoft created the DLR...

Here, we chat about that they're working on and what problems they face.

Another interesting discussion with brilliant people at Lang.NET 2008.

Enjoy.

Low res download file.

Patrick Dussud: Managing Garbage Collection

Charles — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:28:40 GMT

Where do objects go when they aren't used anymore (and how to know that they are no longer useful to the executing code that created them)? Might seem like a silly question to most developers, but that's what Technical Fellow Patrick Dussud has been dealing with for most of his career. His special area of focus is implementing garbage collection (GC) in various programming languages and systems (from JScript to the CLR).

In this episode, we discuss with Patrick how GC concepts and implementations have evolved over the years, how the GC in the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) might be different from others, and how GC improvements in the future may need to change to deal with advancements in both software and hardware systems.

Patrick also has some interesting things to say about clowns.

This episode of Behind the Code is hosted by Robert Hess, Director in the Developer and Platform Evangelism Group. Although new to hosting Behind the Code, Robert is no stranger to hosting technical shows. For more than seven years, he hosted The .NET Show, a popular on-demand webcast that focused on providing architectural and programming information to developers around the world.

Low res download file for bandwidth challenged.

Scott Guthrie: What's Coming for Mix, Part 2: Windows, Web, and RIA

Dan Fernandez — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:52:46 GMT

In the second part of this two-part interview, Scott discusses how this year's Mix (http://visitmix.com/2008/) is going to be even larger than last year's, covering everything from Windows Presentation Foundation improvements to Web development frameworks including Dynamic Data and the MVC Framework, to dropping some hints about upcoming tooling support, and the major improvements in Silverlight 2.0.

You'll also hear Scott talk about the different needs of developers and designers with Expression, how he personally wrote the <asp:Calendar> control, the unique challenges in building controls and how XAML enables unmatched control composability.

Low Res Video Download

Code To Live: Jay Wren on the Boo Programming Language

joshholmes — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:31:25 GMT

Jay Wren, the self appointed evangelist for Boo, agreed to meet with Josh Holmes and talk with me about Boo the programming language.

JAOO 2007: Erik Meijer and Dave Thomas - Objects, Functions, Virtual Machines, IDEs and Other Fun St

Charles — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:05:00 GMT

JAOO 2007: Kresten Krab Thorup - JAOO What. How. Why.

Charles — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:02:25 GMT

I recently got the chance to attend JAOO in Aarhus, Denmark. Besids learning a great amount about various approaches to solving hard problems that we all face as programmers (regardless of the stack we spend most of our time developing on), I got to meet so many interesting people from all walks of programmer life. What a great conference! For one thing, JAOO not about specifc products. It's not about one company's view of the world. It's not about one class of technologies or developer. It's not just about Java and LAMP or .NET and Windows.

JAOO is a unique conference and I love the way sessions are reviewed by attendees: after the session ends attendees can simply choose red, yellow or green pieces of paper and place them in a bucket. Red means the session was poor. Yellow means it was OK. Green means it was good. Attendees are also encouraged to write feedback on the piece of colored paper they choose. Simple, yet incredibly effective. Hey, PDC people. Pay attention.

JAOO is a truly interdisciplinary conference that attracts some of the smartest folks in the industry. Luckily, I got a chance to spend some time with a few of these programming pioneers and innovators and you will get to meet them over the coming days.

First up is Kresten Krab Thorup. For those of you who program in Java, you've undoubtedly heard of Kresten. Dr. Kresten Krab Thorup is Chief Architext and Co-founder and one of the Software Pilots of Trifork. Kresten in largely known for his work on integrating generics into Java. He is also one of the creators JAOO and each year, besides being the MC of the event, he can be spotted wandering around the conference in a bright green jacket engaging attendees and speakers.

I had a great time and JAOO 2007. My perspective has changed in terms of Us vs Them mentality as well gaining a new respect for both dynamic languages and functional programming. (You will be seeing some very interesting interviews with some of the pioneers of these two "hot" programming techniques).

Enjoy and a very big thank you to the wonderful JAOO team for inviting me to JAOO 2007 and providing unrestricted access to the event and speakers. I hope to be back next year!

Programming in the Age of Concurrency - Anders Hejlsberg and Joe Duffy: Concurrent Programming with

Charles — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:21:00 GMT

Microsoft is developing a number of technologies to simplify the expression of parallelism in code. An example of this work is Parallel Extensions for the .NET Framework (PFX), a managed programming model for data parallelism, task parallelism, scheduling, and coordination on parallel hardware.

PFX makes it easier for developers to write programs that take advantage of parallel hardware (you've all heard of multi-core and what the future holds with many-core...), without having to deal with the complexities of threads and locks in today’s concurrent programming story. Of course, PFX is not a concurrent programming silver bullet. There is still a great deal of work left to do in the imperative programming world's approach to concurrency. PFX is an excellent start with a syntax that .NET developers can relate to and understand.

Here, Joe Duffy, Senior Software Engineer, and Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg sit down with me to discuss the basics and some of the details of the managed PFX library's architecture and implementation, whiteboard included.

For more information on specific technologies, check out the PLINQ and TPL articles in the October 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine.

High res video download file here.

Code to Live: Rob Howard and Richard Hale Shaw on Opening the .NET Source Code

joshholmes — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 05:40:55 GMT

In this show, Rob Howard and Richard Hale Shaw discuss their opinions on opening up the .NET Source code and how that was done.

Jack Gudenkauf - .Net 3.5 for ISVs

Mike Sampson — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:07:51 GMT

Several weeks back James Vastbinder was able to coax Jack Gudenkauf into doing an interview on .NET 3.5 targeted at ISVs. Jack is an Architect on the Base Class Library team and tasked to work with Microsoft’s ISV Partners.

In this interview:

Jack talks about the BCL team and how they work within the larger Server and Tools business unit.
An inside view of the new Add-In Model in 3.5, (Its Jack's baby and he's rightly proud).
The Process ISV should mentally walk through when moving to managed code.
Tools and utilities used by the CLR team.

Technorati Tags: JackG, CLR, .NET3.5, BCL, Add-Ins, Jvast, Microsoft

Italia 9: Alessandro Catorcini e Affidabilita’ del .NET Framework

Charles — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:44:33 GMT

Passate le vacanze, ecco puntuale la seconda puntata di Italia 9!

Questa volta Vittorio e’ andato a trovare Alessandro Catorcini, un altro genovese che fa il senior program manager nel common language runtime team. Dopo la chiacchierata di rito sul come sia finito a lavorare in America per Microsoft, Alessandro parla a ruota libera del CLR: si va dal positioning di Silverlight all’hosting del common language runtime in applicazioni ad altissima affidabilita’ come SQL Server. Durante la discussione alessandro cita un paper sull’hosting che puo’ essere scaricato da qui; fa inoltre frequente menzione del blog CLR Inside Out, disponibilie da qui.

Come di consueto, Alessandro terra’ d’occhio i commenti al video: se avete domande non esitate a premere “Reply”.

Arrivederci alla prossima puntata!

And the English version, below:

Italia 9: Alessandro Catorcini and .NET Framework Reliability

Now that vacation time is gone, here there’s the second episode of Italia 9!

This time Vittorio went to visit Alessandro Catorcini, another guy from Genova who works as Senior Program manager in the common language runtime team.After the usual chat about how he ended up working for Microsft in theUS, Alessandro talks about the CLR: the discussion flows from Silverlight positioning to the aspects of hosting the CLR on highly reliable applications such as SQL Server. During the discussion Alessandro quotes a paper about CLR hosting, that can be downloaded from here; furthermore, he often mentions the blog CLR Inside Out (feed here).

As usual, Alessandro will keep an eye on the comments; if you have questions please do not heistate to press on the “Reply button.

See you in the next episode!

Overview of .NET Framework v3.5

Daniel Moth — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 13:59:00 GMT

Author: Hi, I am Daniel Moth :)

Introduction: There is much confusion about what .NET Framework 3.5 is and how it relates to v3.0 and v2.0. In this video I try to explain that and also show you the entire list of the new assemblies with a sentence or two on what each one contains and where they reside. On the way, I share how I personally explore new assemblies in case it is useful to anyone. My relevant blog posts to look at are here and here.

Video download: Click on the image to play the video (from a streaming file). If you'd prefer to download the wmv packaged in a zip file, you may do so here.

Patrick Dussud: Garbage Collection - Past, Present and Future

Charles — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 19:05:54 GMT

I finally got a chance to sit down and talk to Patrick Dussud, one of the CLR founders and chief architect of the .NET Garbage Collector, or GC, as developers call it. I wanted to learn about what a GC is, how it works, why it does what it does, how it will evolve, Patrick's history in the industry, and, of course, get