• Take a look at the 'My Online Meetings' script for touchdevelop.

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

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

• DKAL home page
• DKAL on CodePlex
• DKAL on rise4fun -- try it live!

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

Here, Wolfram Schulte interviews Barış at ICSE 2011. Though the ambient lighting is poor, the conversation isn't! Sorry about that, but sometimes you get the lighting that's in the room (the ambient light monad) when you record videos with a handy-cam camera (my trusted old friend).

[My apologies for the poor lighting. The conversation, on the other hand, is very bright!]

Prof. Rombach's main research topics can be found in the area of "Software Engineering", especially in methods for developing software with predictable quality, in quantitative methods for measuring and assessing software products and software processes, in languages and methods for developing and using explicit software process models, in process-based software development environments as well as in software reuse. As a consultant, he works for various U.S. American and European companies.[source]

Dr. Rombach currently leads both the Research Group for Software Engineering (AGSE) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE).

Here, Wolfram Schulte interviews Dr. Rombach at ICSE 2011. You'll get a high level overview of Dr. Rombach's work in designing and implementing scalable strategies and methodologies for controlling complexity and adding reliability to software development projects of any size and complexity. This is a very interesting and important aspect of the software engineering discipline. Dr. Rombach also enjoys the challenges of managing complexity in an entirely unrelated context. Tune in to find out what this may be...

Here, Wolfram Schulte and Grigore briefly discuss the potential of K, a term rewriting based executable semantic framework for defining programming languages, and Matching Logic, an executable semantics framework yielding an alternative (to Hoare logic) program verification logic. It's another great conversation from Channel 9's coverage of ICSE 2011. Thanks to Wolfram and Grigore! Tune in.

In this video, Wolfram Schulte joins Victor to discuss the challenges of making concurrency easier for developers. One of the really interesting approaches that Victor and team are investigating is concurrency auto-tuning, and the example discussed here involve adding OS kernel-level support for auto-tuning user mode applications for manycore processor architectures. This is very fascinating research with great potential. Concurrency auto-tuner in an OS kernel? Concurrency-enlightened operating systems? Why not? Always great to meet young innovators with no fear of failure. I hope to see this type of thing materialize. Very interesting research and real world problem.  Go Victor. Go!

Thanks to Wolfram and Victor for another great conversation. Tune in.

Tune in. Enjoy.

Recently, I got to attend ICSE 2011 and, even better, I got to record a bunch of Expert to Expert conversations with the great Wolfram Schulte and some legends in various areas of computer science and engineering. What a treat! Thank you, Wolfram!

Thankfully, I got to attend ICSE 2011 and, even better, got to record a bunch of Expert to Expert episodes that feature the great Wolfram Schulte leading the conversations with specialists in various areas of computer science and engineering. What a treat! Thank you, Wolfram.

Kumiyo Nakakoji, Director at Key Technology Laboratory, Software Research Associates Inc., Japan, received B.S. in computer science from Osaka University, Japan, in 1986, and M.S. in 1990 and Ph.D. in 1993, both in computer science from University of Colorado, Boulder, certified in Institute of Cognitive Science. She has been spending her research career both in industry and academia. She has served as chairs, editors, and members for numerous research committees, journals, conferences, and government funding agencies, in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Software Engineering, and Design and Creative Knowledge Work Support. She was awarded Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from College of Engineering, University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2006.

Dr. Nakakoji gave the Day 1 keynote at ICSE 2011, "Interactivity, Continuity, Sketching & Experience". The topic was design, both designing software(the world of making) and user-centric software design(the world of using). Often, these two worlds collide rather than work in unison - you have design professionals painting pictures and building out a user-centric experience and then you have software engineers who design and implement the software systems and algorithms that realize and drive the overall user experience of the software. The best case scenario is one where designers and implementors/engineers work in tandem throughout the development lifecycle. Let's find out from Dr. Nakakoji why this is the case.

Thankfully, I got to attend ICSE 2011 and, even better, got to record a bunch of Expert to Expert episodes that feature the great Wolfram Schulte leading the conversations with specialists in various areas of computer science and engineering. What a treat! Thank you, Wolfram.

In this video, we meet Andreas Zeller, the creator of delta debugging and, in some sense, the world's preeminent debugger mind. His book, Why Programs Fail, should be on the shelves (and not collecting dust, mind you!) of all software developers. Dr. Zeller is very passionate about the discipline of software engineering—the craft of writing software, of making software systems. In particular, Dr. Zeller is a champion of code assertions! If you can't assert what you mean, then what do you really mean? What does Dr. Zeller really mean with this assertion business? Tune in.

As developers, we know how much time we spend debugging compared to composing. For some of us, all nighters are more a result of bug chasing than feature building or algorithm construction/optimizations—Andreas has a great perspective on debugging and what all developers should do in order to work 9-5 and get plenty of sleep

Enjoy.

In this video, learn how to use state variables in TouchDevelop with Michał Moskal from the Research in Software Engineering group (RiSE) at Microsoft Research.

• Follow TouchDevelop on Facebook

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

In this video, Peli de Halleux, from the Research in Software Engineering group (RiSE) at Microsoft Research, gives a tutorial using the TouchDevelop editor. Learn how to chart mathematical functions in TouchStudio.

• follow TouchDevelop on Facebook

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

In all seriousness, with the online world becoming increasingly complex with its distributed services communicating over various protocols, information that materializes on end points as plain text, and non-uniform payment service policies—with the cherry on top being non-uniform identity of communicating parties—well, business can get messy. MSR researchers Shuo Chen and Shaz Qadeer, as well as PhD student and key author of this really interesting research paper, Rui Wang, join me for a conversation about the implications of this research(another author of the paper is XiaoFeng Wang of Indiana University Bloomington). Most importantly, however, I try to get them to give me the details about how I can fool online merchants into shipping me goods for free (just kidding!) and what they think is needed to fix this problem in a mathematically precise fashion (static/dynamic analysis, security-based policy languages for CaaS, etc.).

Tune in and get a sense of what TAL is, how type verification works for assembly code, benefits, trade-offs, and much more. Enjoy.

In this video, Peli de Halleux, from the Research in Software Engineering group (RiSE) at Microsoft Research, gives a basic tutorial using the TouchDevelop editor. Learn how to write 'Hello World' in TouchStudio (and how to use its editor).

• Follow TouchDevelop on Facebook

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

In this video, Nikolai Tillmann and Michal Moskal, from the Research in Software Engineering group (RiSE) at Microsoft Research, present TouchDevelop for Windows Phone 7. TouchDevelop is a radically new Windows Phone software development environment, bringing the excitement of the first programmable personal computers to the phone. Now you can write code for your phone on your phone!

• follow TouchDevelop on Facebook 

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

Note: Unlike our first video, there's no zooming or blurring in this video—promise!

This is the third and final part in our introductory series of lectures exploring the fundamental logical construct that powers all that we do as software engineers—the algorithm.

In part 3, Dr. Gurevich teaches us about bounded complexity and the axiomatic definition of sequential algorithms.

Find some time to watch this. You'll be learning about algorithms from one of the world's premiere minds in the science of logic and algorithms. In this lecture, Yuri references a few of his academic papers, which you can find here.

Thank you, Yuri, for taking the time to share your extensive knowledge and gentle, kind spirit with Niner Nation. We all really appreciate it! Thanks, too, to Wes Dyer and Bart De Smet for being our live audience for this lecture and asking great questions.

Part 1
Part 2

In this video, Nikolai Tillmann and Michal Moskal, from the Research in Software Engineering group (RiSE) at Microsoft Research, present a new Windows Phone 7 application: TouchDevelop. TouchDevelop is a radically new Windows Phone software development environment, bringing the excitement of the first programmable personal computers to the phone. Now you can write code for your phone on your phone!

• follow TouchDevelop on Facebook

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

PEX4FUN necessarily involves writing code, but you will probably spend more time thinking about the solutions to problems than you do typing characters on your phone. Still, coding on mobile devices is a very interesting idea and it will be very interesting to see where Nikolai, Peli and team take this. As is the case with RiSE and MSR generally, limits will be pushed and discoveries made.

Here, we talk to some of the RiSE geniuses about PEX, http://pexforfun.com and of course this new WP7 game, PEX4FUN. You've met Peli de Halleux and Nikolai Tillmann before, but this time they are both in front of the camera at the same time. (Thanks, Peli, for all the great RiSE content you've made for 9 over the years!)

So, how does PEX4FUN work? How did they build it? How is it related to pex4fun the web site? Oh, and did they use Rx in the Intellisense engine? What's the backstory behind pex and pex4fun.com?

It’s always great to catch up with the RiSE team, one my favorite groups of engineers and scientists at Microsoft. Please download the free game from Windows Phone Marketplace, play with it, push it and provide feedback back to Peli and Nikolai.

RiSE.PEX4FUN.PlayNow();

C

This is the second part in a series of lectures exploring the fundamental logic-recipe powering all that we do as software engineers and computer scientists—the algorithm. What is an algorithm? You may be surprised to learn that this is not a simple question. Nonetheless, in this video, Yuri presents an answer—one that is perhaps somewhat controversial in nature—based on his own research and philosophy.

Thank you, Yuri, for taking the time to share your extensive knowledge and gentle, kind spirit with Niner Nation. We all really appreciate it! Thanks, too, to Wes Dyer and Bart De Smet for being our live audience for this lecture and asking great questions!

See Part 1
See Part 3

Once you've authored and analyzed your sanitizer in BEK, you can automatically get a C#/Javascript version of it.

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

Bart De Smet is one of the highly talented software engineers on Erik Meijer's team and the chief architect of the LINQ to Anything dream. You should watch his excellent PDC10 session on this topic.As you learned on Channel 9 Live's PDC10 conversation with Wolfram Schulte and Erik Meijer, Z3 is a theorem prover (the fastest in the world, in fact). Z3 is one of several advanced software engineering technologies coming out of MSR's RiSE team.

A while ago, Bart implemented a LINQ to Z3 library and I've wanted to dig into this with him for some time. Recently, I got the chance to do just that and it makes for an excellent episode of Going Deep.

Bart writes in his initial post on the LINQ to Z3 project:

With LINQ to Z3 my goal is to abstract away from the low-level Z3 APIs and provide nice syntax with rich static typing support on top of it. The basic idea is the following:

• Define the “shape” of a theorem, e.g. what symbolic names (and their types) to use;
• Express constraints over those symbolic names using LINQ syntax (more specifically the where keyword);
• Ask the resulting object for a solution, resulting in an instance of the “shape” type specified at the start.

An example of LINQ to Z3:

var theorem = from t in ctx.NewTheorem<Symbols<int, int, int, int, int>>()
              where t.X1 - t.X2 >= 1
              where t.X1 - t.X2 <= 3
              where t.X1 == (2 * t.X3) + t.X5
              where t.X3 == t.X5
              where t.X2 == 6 * t.X4
              select t;
var solution = theorem.Solve();
Console.WriteLine("X1 = {0}, X2 = {1}, X3 = {2}, X4 = {3}, X5 = {4}", solution.X1, solution.X2, solution.X3, solution.X4, solution.X5);

How does LINQ to Z3 work, exactly? Why did Bart do this? What is Z3 useful for? How does it work? Here, we get answers to all of these questions with lots of meaty whiteboarding and demo at the end of the conversation. As usual, there is a lot of information presented here and in a way that is readily understandable by non-experts - this is one of Bart's excellent traits: clearly explaining complex subjects so you don't have to be as smart as Bart to fully understand. I left Bart's office with better understanding of LINQ, Z3 and LINQ to Z3 (also Solver Foundation and Bart's definition of monad....). Thank you, Bart!

By the way, this is espisode 201 of Going Deep. Bart and LINQ were the focus for the 100th episode. It's nice to have this 100 episode cycle (LINQ to Anything is LINQ to Everything in this revolution). Thanks to all who have made this series truly interesting! Here's to 200 more.

Tune in.

Learn. Enjoy. Code.

Building applications that are responsive and can exploit parallel hardware poses an important challenge. In particular, enabling applications to execute various tasks in parallel can be difficult if those tasks exhibit read and write conflicts. Revisions are forked and joined much like asynchronous tasks. However, rather than accessing global shared data directly (and thereby risking data races or atomicity violations), all revisions execute on a (conceptual) copy of the shared state, a "global mutable snapshot" so to speak. Any changes performed in a revision apply to that snapshot only, until the revision is joined at which the [sic] changes become globally effective [source = http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/revisions/].

Here, Erik Meijer interrogates (in a nice way) computer scientists Daan Leijen and Sebastian Burckhardt, the researchers behind Revisions. As usual, Erik asks great questions and the scientists spend much of the time at the whiteboard, drawing and writing answers to clearly explain what revisions are, how they work, and why this model matters. In a nice twist of fate, Erik was Daan's PhD advisor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands (that must have been awesome—lucky Daan!).

Revisions are yet another example of the great work coming out of the RiSE group in MSR. You don't have to wait for a "CTP" of Revisions for C# -> Just go to http://rise4fun.com/Revisions and write some code! Thanks to Peli and the RiSE team developers for implementing such an awesome web-based experimentation sandbox.

Tune in. Learn. Enjoy.