Entries tagged with research - Channel 9

Trident Workbench

Sam Stokes — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:22:00 GMT

Hey, take a look at the Trident Workbench from Microsoft Research. It is a great idea, and with time it looks like it will evolve into a great tool for scienitists and researchers.

It can be found at: Trident Workbench

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.

Stefan Is… researching the art (or is it Science?) of Search

Max — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:02:00 GMT

Believe it or not, Search is a relatively new technology. You probably perform a few searches a day… how satisfied are you with the results?

Stefan and I sat down with Martin, a Senior Product Manager on the Search team, to find out the process for improving search and where things may be trending. An interesting discussion with the slickest sticky-note you’ve seen today ;).

Johnny Lee: Microsoft Researcher

Robert Hess — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:57:00 GMT

Johnny Lee works in Microsoft Research, with a specific penchant at creating interesting and useful devices. He has a session scheduled for MIX09 called "Interaction Techniques Using the Wii Remote" where he will show off some interesting uses he has found for using the Wii Remote as a PC input device, as well as several other devices he has put together to utilize in various computer input scenarios. I thought it would be fun to chat with him about his work creating some of these devices, and get some pointers on how others might benefit from this as well.

You can also find some videos of his experiments here:

And here is the description of the session he is doing at MIX09:

Interaction Techniques Using the Wii Remote (and Other HCI Projects)
by: Johnny Lee

The Wii remote is a sophisticated controller containing a variety of sensing capabilities. In this session, Johnny Lee covers several interaction techniques enabled by the Wii remote and explains how you can develop your own applications. Johnny also introduces a few of his other research projects in the broader domain of Human-Computer Interaction.

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.

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.

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 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/

Microsoft Research Demonstrates Software-driven Breakthroughs

D. Begley — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:29:00 GMT

On stage at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference 2008 today, Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, showed developers how Microsoft is marshalling the power of software to help solve some of the toughest technological and societal challenges. Read about Microsoft Research at PDC2008 here.

Research: Concurrency Analysis Platform and Tools for Finding Concurrency Bugs

System — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:39:25 GMT

Learn about the Concurrency Analysis Platform (CAP) from Microsoft Research and how it enables various concurrency bug-finding tools. See a demo of CHESS, a tool built on CAP for finding and reproducing Heisenbugs. Also hear about future tools from Microsoft Research, including a lightweight data-race detection engine and a tool for finding memory-model errors.

Thomas Ball
Thomas Ball is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research where he manages the Software Reliability Research group (http://research.microsoft.com/srr/). Tom has been at Microsoft Research since 1999. He is one of the originators of the SLAM project, a software model checking engine for C that forms the basis of the Static Driver Verifier tool, made freely available by Microsoft for finding defects in device drivers. Tom's interests range from program analysis, model checking, testing and automated theorem proving to the problems of defining and measuring software quality.
Madan Musuvathi
Madan Musuvathi is a Researcher at Microsoft Research and is interested in building program analysis tools to improve the productivity of developers and testers. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2004.

Research: Contract Checking and Automated Test Generation with Pex

System — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:39:13 GMT

In theory, Design by Contract and unit testing are excellent approaches to improve code quality. Learn how to use code contracts that express pre-conditions, post-conditions, and object invariants in any managed language that improve testability, enhance static analysis, and serve as checked API documentation. Contracts are leveraged for advanced static analysis and translated into runtime checks. See how automated program exploration (Pex) discovers boundary conditions in code that cause failures and generates traditional unit test suites with high code coverage. Contracts and Pex work together to target contract checks, runtime failures (null dereferences, index out of range, etc.), and any other kind of assertions. Use them to write higher quality software with less effort.

Nikolai Tillmann
Nikolai Tillmann has been with Microsoft Research for 6 years. He is currently leading the Pex project, building an automated test case generation tool for .NET based program analysis. Previously, he worked on Spec Explorer, a model-based testing tool.
Mike Barnett
Mike Barnett has been at Microsoft Research since 1995. He has spent the last several years working on the Spec# project, an advanced verification environment and language for .NET.

Research: BAM, AjaxScope, and Doloto

System — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:39:11 GMT

See Microsoft Research present new technologies for developing, debugging, and deploying web applications. Hear how BAM can turn a simple specification into a web-based cloud application with the click of a button. Learn how AjaxScope and Doloto automatically instrument and rewrite your web applications' JavaScript code for end-to-end monitoring and optimization.

Ethan Jackson
Emre Kiciman
Emre Kiciman is a researcher in the Internet Services Research Center (ISRC) at Microsoft Research, where his interests are broadly in the area of large-scale Internet services, their operations, and their end-to-end reliability. His work focuses on monitoring and machine learning analysis of system behavior to improve reliability and performance. Most recently, he's been working on Web application performance and debugging.

Research: Designing the World Wide Telescope

System — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:36:08 GMT

Hear from the architect of the World Wide Telescope discuss the challenges and opportunities in creating World Wide Telescope as a massively scalable software plus services application. Understand the scale of the data, the communities and capabilities of user generated content, and the rich client application and the service behind it.

Jonathan Fay
Jonathan is a 15 year Microsoft veteran who focuses on studying the intersection of graphics/imaging and networks. He is currently the architect of Microsoft WorldWide Telescope. Jonathan is also an avid amateur astronomer and designed built his own automated domed observatory as well as helped develop the field of DSLR astrophotography. When he is not at work on WorldWide Telescope Jonathan tries keep up with his 5 children and explain to them the majesty of the stars.