Operating System

In developing Windows 8, power efficiency was a primary engineering theme. This means that all aspects of the system were designed and developed with efficient power usage in mind. It's paid off—Windows 8 is the most power efficient version of Windows to date. In this video, Windows Development Lead…

Chris Stevens is a software developer on the Windows kernel team working on the Windows boot environment. Windows 8 boots faster than any other version of Windows. Why? How? Chris begins with the fundamentals (so, if you don't know anything about the boot process or what actually happens when an OS…

Jon Berry, a veteran Windows engineer, digs into the new way Windows 8 manages processes to support the brave new world of Windows running on various CPU architectures including ARM and ATOM, which present an interesting set of technical challenges given the need to aggressively preserve energy when…

Drawbridge is a research prototype of a new form of virtualization for application sandboxing. Drawbridge combines two core technologies: First, a picoprocess, which is a process-based isolation container with a minimal kernel API surface. Second, a library OS, which is a version of Windows…

There have been a lot of positive reviews of the upcoming Windows Phone 7 OS release, code named "Mango." This release is a big one. It contains over 500 new features (and over 1000 new APIs), is full of improvements - from the core OS to the performance of UI scrolling - and…

Continuing on with our coverage of ICSE 2011, meet Dr. Victor Pankratius. Dr. Pankratius heads the Multicore Software Engineering investigator group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. He also serves as the elected chairman of the Software Engineering for parallel Systems (SEPARS)…

Typed Assembly Language (TAL) extends traditional untyped assembly languages with typing annotations, memory management primitives, and a sound set of typing rules. These typing rules guarantee the memory safety, control flow safety, and type safety of TAL programs. Moreover, the typing constructs…

The Singularity project (an OS written in managed code used for research purposes) has provided several very useful research results and opened new avenues for exploration in operating system design. Recently, MSR released a paper covering an operating system research project that takes a new…

Mark Russinovich is a Technical Fellow working on the Windows Azure team. His focus is on solving hard problems related to the Fabric Controller, which is in some sense the Windows Azure operating system kernel - it provides services and management infrastructure for the applications that run on…

Tom Talpey, Software Architect, discussed the UNIX extensions for SMB2 protocol initiative during the 2010 File Sharing Windows Protocols Plugfest.