charles

In your hands: IE 9 - Surfing on Metal with GPU Powered HTML5

Charles — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:18:00 GMT

Get your hands on the IE9 developer platform preview!

We drop in on IE PM and graphics enginering legend Ted Johnson and IE dev platform PM John Hrvatin to discuss what we learned in Dean's office: hardware accelerated HTML5.

In your hands: IE9 and SVG - Past, Present and Future of Vector Graphics for the Web

Charles — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:18:00 GMT

Get your hands on the IE9 developer platform preview!

Graphics programming master Christian Fortini and IE SVG PM Patrick Dengler discuss IE9's native support for SVG. Some very cool demos here!

In your hands: IE 9 Performance - From JS to COM to DOM to HTML5 on GPU

Charles — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:18:00 GMT

Get your hands on the IE9 developer platform preview!

IE Performance PM Jason Weber and Performance Dev Lead Venkat Kudallur take us through the updated and improved performance pipeline in IE (hardware accelerated graphics rendering, new JavaScript engine (employing a dual execution pipeline), improved downloader, etc). We also get to see some really cool demos!

In your hands: Introducing the IE9 Developer Platform Preview

Charles — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:18:00 GMT

Get your hands on the IE9 developer platform preview!

The IE team has been very busy working on the next version of Internet Explorer, aka IE 9. Today, you can get your hands on a developer preview and experience the joys surfing on metal with GPU powered HTML5. Yep, that's HTML5. Microsoft loves HTML5 and CSS 3.

Here, IE GM Dean Hachamovitch and Rob Mauceri discuss how they're taking IE to a new level with all graphic rendering taking place on the GPU via the DirectX technology D2D and a new JavaScript engine that compiles JavaScript to machine code and can do this in a way that takes advantage of multi-core architectures (you will learn much more about this in the coming weeks..).

Summary: IE9, which you can get in your hands now in the form of a developer preview, enables you to exploit the power of the GPU in ways you already understand (CSS, HTML, JavaScript).

Brian Beckman: On Analog Computing, Some Beckman History, and Life in the Universe

Charles — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:04:00 GMT

It's been far too long since we've chatted with the great Brian Beckman, an astrophysicist, software architect, and Channel 9 icon. Some of you may know him as the wizard who appears out of thin air whenever the word Monad is said three times in succession. :->

A few weeks ago, Erik Meijer sent an email to Brian with a link to some videos about the use of analog computers in the US Navy in the 1950s. This got Brian thinking and reflecting about his past. Turns out Brian's father was a famous Hollywood actor who also produced training movies for the US Navy. Well, I was added on to the email thread and we taped the conversation in this video a few days later.

It's always a pleasure to embark on an unscripted chat with Dr. Beckman. There are always great nuggets of wisdom and insight around every corner. Here, you'll learn about some of Brian's personal history, some insights on analog computing, and even some discussion on the Drake equation, N = N* fp ne fl fi fc fL, which attempts to formalize the probability of intelligent life in the universe.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy.

Steven Cloherty: Microsoft Online Services Risk Management

Charles — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:31:00 GMT

In this Microsoft Online Services executive video, we meet Steven Cloherty, Senior Director of Risk Management for Microsoft Online Services. Steven runs our risk management team which includes security, privacy, business continuity, and regulatory compliance teams. He and his teams make sure that our services are safe and recoverable, that our customers’ data are safe, and that their privacy is protected.

The Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) has recently earned the Statement on Auditing Standard (SAS) No. 70 Type II, Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 compliance, and the International Organization for Standardization’s (ISO) 27001 standard – among others. In addition, Microsoft has launched a new dedicated government cloud as part of the Business Productivity Online Suite to meet the most rigorous government requirements for security and privacy, including complying with the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Learn how these and other certifications help ensure our customers security, privacy, and business continuity.

Learn more in the Microsoft Online Services community:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/msonline
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MicrosoftOnlineServices
MOS Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/msonline/

Brother to Brother: The Sampsons - From Rocky's Boots to the Cloud Frontier

Charles — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:23:00 GMT

Mike Sampson (aka Sampy) is a lead developer who has worked on two iterations of Channel 9 and several other websites that sprung from our team. Before joining us, Sampy was a developer on the Visual Basic team. As you'll learn here, he started programming at a young age. Sampy's got mad skillz.

Adam Sampson (aka Sampy's younger brother) is a developer on the Windows Azure SDK team. He's done some very interesting experiments in/on Azure, as you'll see (in fact, he's known as the "guy who gets crazy stuff to run on Azure"). Apparently, MadSkillz are genetic constructs..

This is the first (and potentially last) episode in a series of brother-to-brother interviews on C9. Here, Sampy interviews Adam about what Adam is working on (Azure dev platform samples) and the brothers reveal the secret to their success in software development and more. Tune in.

Enjoy.

IE9 at MIX10

Charles — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:11:00 GMT

Just announced: Dean Hachamovich will be keynoting at MIX10. He'll talk about changes and improvements that have been made to Internet Explorer 9 since PDC09. His talk is sure to include a couple of surprises...

Greg Leake: Stocktrader - Overview

Charles — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:10:00 GMT

Greg Leake is very passionate about loosely-coupled service-oriented n-tiered application architecture. He has created an impressive service-oriented application called StockTrader. We will be highlighting his great work over the coming days with a four part mini-series on StockTrader. Most of the series will be comprised of demos of StockTrader in action and explanations of what's going on behind the scenes in this truly exemplary example of how to create a powerful client-server application that is based on a loosely-coupled service architecture. Further, the interoperability story here is excellent (one of the great advantages of standards-based protocols...).

This is an architectural overview of Stocktrader. See Greg demo this incredible SOA application here:

Demo Part 1
Demo Part 2
Demo Part 3

From the stocktrader site:

"This application is an end-to-end sample application for .NET Enterprise Application Server technologies. It is a service-oriented application based on Windows Communication Foundation (.NET 3.0) and ASP.NET, and illustrates many of the .NET enterprise development technologies for building highly scalable, rich "enterprise-connected" applications. It is designed as a benchmark kit to illustrate alternative technologies within .NET and their relative performance.

The application offers full interoperability with J2EE and IBM WebSphere's Trade 6.1 sample application. As such, the application offers an excellent opportunity for developers to learn about .NET and building interoperable, service-oriented applications."

Tune in!

C9 Conversations: Yuri Gurevich On Logic, Imperative, Abstraction and Algorithms

Charles — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:10:00 GMT

Welcome to the latest installment of C9 Conversations. For this episode, we were very fortunate to get a chance to converse openly with one of the world’s preeminent mathematical logicians, the great Yuri Gurevich.

Dr. Gurevich is Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He is currently a principle research scientist in Wolfram Schulte’s RiSE team (Research in Software Engineering group at Microsoft Research).

Originally, Dr. Gurevich started his career as an algebraist. Later he became a logician. Then he moved to computer science, where his main projects have been Abstract State Machines, Average Case Computational Complexity, and Finite Model Theory. Dr. Gurevich has been honored as a Dr. Honoris Causa of the University of Limburg, Belgium (1998), as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (1996), as well as a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1995).

Dr. Gurevich's fundamental work on the theory of Abstract State Machines (ASMs) is of paramount importance for theoretical and applied computer science. The significance of the theoretical concepts developed by Gurevich is confirmed by the substantial impact they have on mathematical modeling of discrete dynamic systems.

*This is probably the only interview in C9's history where a good case is made for imperative programming versus declarative and functional (this starts right off the bat at around 02:31).

Read Yuri's Annotated Articles

Tune in. Meet Yuri Gurevich.

Greg Leake: Stocktrader Demo, 1 of 3

Charles — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:08:00 GMT

Greg Leake is very passionate about loosely-coupled service-oriented n-tiered application architecture. He has created an impressive service-oriented application called StockTrader. We will be highlighting his great work over the coming days with a four part mini-series on StockTrader. Most of the series will be comprised of demos of StockTrader in action and explanations of what's going on behind the scenes in this truly exemplary example of how to create a powerful client-server application that is based on a loosely-coupled service architecture. Further, the interoperability story here is excellent (one of the great advantages of standards-based protocols...).

This is Part 2: Demo of StockTrader in action, discussion of architecture and implementation.

See part 1, introduction and deep architectural overview, here.

From the stocktrader site:

Greg Leake: Stocktrader Demo, 3 of 3

Charles — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:06:00 GMT

Greg Leake is very passionate about loosely-coupled service-oriented n-tiered application architecture. He has created an impressive service-oriented application called StockTrader. We will be highlighting his great work over the coming days with a four part mini-series on StockTrader. Most of the series will be comprised of demos of StockTrader in action and explanations of what's going on behind the scenes in this truly exemplary example of how to create a powerful client-server application that is based on a loosely-coupled service architecture. Further, the interoperability story here is excellent (one of the great advantages of standards-based protocols...).

This is Part 4: Continuation of the demo of StockTrader in action shoing interoperability between .NET and WebSphere, looking at performance and clustering, and discussion of architecture/implementation...

See part 1, introduction and deep architectural overview, here.

From the stocktrader site:

Greg Leake: Stocktrader Demo, 2 of 3

Charles — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:05:00 GMT

Greg Leake is very passionate about loosely-coupled service-oriented n-tiered application architecture. He has created an impressive service-oriented application called StockTrader. We will be highlighting his great work over the coming days with a four part mini-series on StockTrader. Most of the series will be comprised of demos of StockTrader in action and explanations of what's going on behind the scenes in this truly exemplary example of how to create a powerful client-server application that is based on a loosely-coupled service architecture. Further, the interoperability story here is excellent (one of the great advantages of standards-based protocols...).

This is Part 3: Continuation of the demo of StockTrader in action shoing interoperability between .NET and WebSphere, and discussion of architecture/implementation...

See part 1, introduction and deep architectural overview, here.

From the stocktrader site:

Jason Zander: Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate Released - General Download Available

Charles — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:06:00 GMT

The Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate is here! Your Beta 2 feedback has been incredibly helpful to the engineering team. A big Thank You from Visual Studio!

Here, Visual Studio General Manager Jason Zander sits down with us to discuss how the Visual Studio engineering team addressed your Beta 2 feedback and made some helpful updates to the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate. Jason even demos some of the improvements made in the VS 2010 RC — and on quite a modest PC.

Jason and his team went to great lengths to improve the overall experience of writing applications inside VS 2010. Performance. Performance. Performance... Of course, Jason and team want you to have the final word regarding whether the updates hit the mark, so please download the RC and take it for a test drive. Your feedback is critical to the VS team and they thank you, as always.

Ron Markezich: Microsoft Online Services Corporate Vice President

Charles — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:26:00 GMT

Meet Ron Markezich, the Microsoft corporate vice president responsible for Microsoft’s Online Services business. Learn about Ron’s career at Microsoft, and hear his thoughts on the past, present, and future of Microsoft Online Services.

What is BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), exactly? When did Microsoft form its online services vision? What does Ron think about the current state of online services? What are the next steps for Microsoft’s online services and the online services industry? How does online services fit into Microsoft's future plans?

Tune in.

Learn more in the Microsoft Online Services community:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/msonline
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MicrosoftOnlineServices
MOS Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/msonline/

Expert to Expert: Inside LINQ-to-SharePoint

Charles — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:51:00 GMT

You first met Bart De Smet in an episode of Expert to Expert with the great Erik Meijer leading the conversational charge. LINQ-to-Anything was a very popular E2E episode and the 100th installment of Going Deep. If anybody in the world is an expert in LINQ-to it's certainly Bart. Not surprisingly, Bart created an implementation of LINQ-to-SharePoint before he started at Microsoft. The SharePoint programmability team was impressed and decided to take a stab at a more robust solution, based loosely on Bart's great work.

Well, here we are today with a new installment of E2E and Bart leading the conversation with two of the key SharePoint team members behind LINQ-to-SharePoint: Program Manager Maxim Lukiyanov and Software Developer Ivan Han.

Here, we learn all about the thinking behind the thinking (rationale, design decisions, solution paths, etc) and where this approach will lead the SharePoint programming experience for pro and non-pro developers alike. We also learn that Bart has joined Erik Meijer's team of superdevelopers! I think Erik just may have the most talented team of creative thinkers and techinal over-achievers in the company! Go team, go!

Tune in. Enjoy.

Here's the two links you need to click on to get started. Please provide feedback!!

SDK with LINQ-toS-SharePoint API

SharePoint Server 2010 Beta

MFC: Implementing handlers for preview, thumbnail and search filtering

Charles — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:11:00 GMT

This is a short demonstration of new MFC features in MFC and ATL which help with integrating your application’s file type into Windows Explorer. This is done by implementing handlers for preview, thumbnail and search filtering, all of which are implemented in an application generated by the MFC application wizard. Pat Brenner, MFC guru and one of the folks who design and implement MFC is your host.

Mike Ziock: Inside Microsoft Online Services Operations

Charles — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:22:00 GMT

For enterprise customers to small businesses, being able to subscribe to software services versus taking on the responsibilities and costs associated with deployment and management of software systems is very compelling. Of course, somebody (in this case Microsoft) has to manage this hosted cloud computing system and ensure that it remains up and running so customers can always check their email or manage their hosted applications and services.

Meet Mike Ziock. He is a Senior Director in Microsoft's Online Services division. Mike's team is cloud operations central. They are responsible for managing and maintaining the infrastructure that powers Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Services.

What do he and his team do, exactly? How does this cloud stuff work from the host operations perspective? What are some of the things that keep Mike and his team up at night?

Tune in.

Karsten Januszewski and Tim Aidlin: Introducing Incarnate

Charles — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:33:00 GMT

Our friends and neighbors at Mix Online have just released the latest version of their site which includes a new lab offering: Incarnate. Incarnate is a REST-based service that uses peoples’ usernames to find their avatars on the web. To do this, Incarnate queries Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Xbox Live and YouTube. Karsten Januszewski and Tim Aidlin are the masterminds behind Incarnate so I decided to take a walk down the hallway of our building to find out from them that what, why and how behind Incarnate. Tune in. This is Old School 9.

Channel 9 Emerges in China

Charles — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:52:00 GMT

Today, in partnership with Microsoft China and CSDN, we launched Channel 9 in China. CSDN Channel 9 is a place where developers will learn about what Chinese developers are working on, thinking about, innovating and, of course, who they are – all in a language that requires no translation.

Today’s launch includes several videos of Chinese developers who do incredible work for Microsoft and Windows, specifically. When you think about reliability, stability, scalability and performance of Windows 7, for example, the people who are highlighted today on CSDN Channel 9 were instrumental in making Windows 7 a super high quality release. Some of these talented engineers are also working on some really hard technical problems at the lowest levels of the system..

About CSDN:

CSDN is a popular online developer community and information portal. CSDN’s aim is to represent all software development technologies in a single portal. From C++ to C#, from Linux to Windows, from Eclipse to Visual Studio, CSDN has it all.

Working with Microsoft China and CSDN, a member of the Channel 9 extended family, has been a fantastic experience for the Channel 9 team and we are very excited to see how this pilot evolves!

You should check it out even if you don't speak Mandarin :) If you do speak Mandarin, well, you will meet some really smart, passionate and creative people - all with stories to tell.

Welcome to China, Channel 9!!!

E2E2E: Meijer, Rys and Vick - Programming Data

Charles — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:53:00 GMT

You asked for it and we delivered: The first E2E2E (expert to expert to expert). Here, Erik Meijer converses with language designer Paul Vick (of VB fame and now focusing on the language code-named "M") and Michael Rys, a long time expert in the world of data programmability working on the SQL Server team. This great conversation covers many topics (data, type systems, programming languages, transactions, beyond the relational database) as you've come to expect from Expert to Expert. Tune in.

Enjoy.

Bharat Shah: Microsoft Online Services Overview

Charles — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:36:00 GMT

Bharat Shah is the General Manager of Microsoft's Online Services division. His group is responsible for taking Microsoft's business productivity software to the cloud, essentially turning traditional utilty software (you buy, deploy, manage) into distributed (Internet/Intranet) hosted services. For enterprise customers to small businesses, being able to subscribe to software services versus taking on the responsibilities and costs associated with deployment and management of software systems is very compelling.

Here, we talk about why this approach to software-as-a-service is so important as we move more of our software skyward. The term BPOS used in the conversation is more of a code name then an official Micrsosoft product moniker. In this case it refers to a suite of communication and collaboration hosted services like Exchange, SharePoint, etc - but there will be more: that's one of the key points here.

Tune in.

Inside Windows 7: Recovering Windows from System Degradation and Boot Failures

Charles — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:58:00 GMT

Windows 7 is capable of certain levels of self-repair, as you've learned. One of the new capabilities in Windows is its ability to recover from serious failures that can impact the OS's ability to boot. How does Windows 7 handle these errors? Can you boot Windows 7 into Safe Mode or to an earlier functional state when something really bad happens? Yes. You can, depending on the nature of the problem. How?

Stephan Doll, Pavan Kasturi, Desmond Lee and Baskar Sridharan make up most of the team that has enabled Windows 7 to be the most recoverable version of Windows to date. By ensuring that every Windows 7 machine has the ability to automatically diagnose and recover from most boot failures with little or no interaction from the user, this team's work promises to greatly reduce—or even eliminate—the impact of a serious issue that would otherwise cause significant pain for Windows 7 users.

Tune in.

C9 Conversations: Brian Beckman on Complexity

Charles — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:24:00 GMT

In this second installment of C9 Conversations, a format where we sit down with various big thinkers to discuss a wide range of big topics related to computing; all in high quality video and audio, the topic is Complexity (ambient complexity, to be precise - it's hard to program systems that are radically composable. Why?).

Dr. Brian Beckman is an astrophysicist and software architect with a long history of dealing with various levels of complexity. In some sense, most of what we do as programmers and engineers is control complexity to solve problems of various difficulty. In our world of software engineering, we strive to carve simplicity out of the complexity of computing. Dr. Beckman provides his insights into why it so hard to achieve radical composability in the software systems we design and build and what it will take to realize ambient simplicity as we march into the increasingly complex world of general purpose computing.

We think you'll really enjoy this conversation with one of Microsoft's best thinkers.

Joe Stegman: Silverlight 4 - Out of Browser Evolves

Charles — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:19:00 GMT

Joe Stegman, Director of Program Management on the Silverlight team, joins us to discuss Silverlight 4's Out of Browser improvements (OOB means you can run Silverlight applications on the desktop, outside of, well, the browser...). Of note, you can now interop with COM objects in SL4's OOB. We also touch on the the future of Silverlight and clearly define the distinctions/differences between Silverlight and WPF. When to use SL? When to use WPF?

Enjoy.