Carmine's Kernel

Programming in the Age of Concurrency: The Accelerator Project

David Tarditi and Sidd Puri, scientists at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, USA, are creating some really compelling managed libraries that provide an elegant approach to writing highly parallel data intensive code. They basically hack the GPU to enable roaringly fast parallel computation. They call this .NET-based framework "Accelerator" and explain it in detail on Channel 9. Check it out and get the bits in your hands now. This is great stuff.

Road to Delhi

[I wrote this while sitting in a small bar across the street from the airport in Delhi, India on my way back home after spending 10 days - my first trip to India - traveling from Delhi to Agra and back, by car]

winding

starting stopping

beeping

wondering out the window

at camels

topheavy

with something

 

people in rags

slacks and shirts

lingering

chaotic roadside

 

colorfully painted promises

herald blissful digital future

but throw only shadows

on the majority below

no food and drink in images

they know

 

fresh water

a meal

homemade homes

plastic rooftops

everywhere garbage

this is the stuff of life

 

cows mingle with the forlorn and privileged

motorbikes merge into two-way madness

carrying families

friends

 

me

a civilized man

educated

travelled

staring into and away from

the obvious irony

of where I am

and where I'm going

CCR Programming on C9

Check out Jeffrey Richter guiding you through code samples of the new, improved CCR API on Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=219308

Jeffrey is a leading authority on Windows programming and threading (thus his interest in the CCR). Great stuff.

A Casual Conversation with Bill Gates

I recently interviewed Bill Gates on Channel 9. He talks openly about IE, future of software, and even where he surfs on the web! It was an honor to meet him. He's a really down to earth person and very nice. You'd never guess he's worth 48 billion dollars. Enjoy!

Mix it up at MIX06

Well, we (some of the folks who brought you PDC03 and PDC05) are putting on another conference and it's targeted at web devs, designers and business professionals who work in the online world. Folks like Amazon, Yahoo, etc. That's who we want to engage and show them our cool technologies that will help them be more productive, profitable, and happy. Something different here, though. We will spend a lot of time conversing with the attendees in groups, addressing their feedback and concerns in real time. How many conferences do that? None that Microsoft puts on. MIX06 is an atypical event and the first of its kind put on by Microsoft.

It should be a great conference given that it will be a significant departure from the traditional Microsoft events. More laid back, more attendee-focused (meaning more time really listening to the attendees vs spraying information all over everybody with a rushed Q&A at the end. No. Not this time. Not at Mix.)

Besides the great things we'll be addressing for the WWW-minded, we'll be in Vegas. Vegas, baby! Definitely one of the better venues for a conference, not to mention we'll be at the Venetian.

I highly encourage any of you in the online world to try and make it. If you're a dev or a designer or both or somebody who thinks about www.business all the time, well, come on down. It will be worth it for sure. But enough of the rhetoric.

Check out the contents of Mix here.

See you in Vegas,

C

Deep Vista Audio Stack and API

Seasoned Niner (Channel 9 member), Larry Osterman, an SDE and 20 year Microsoft veteran, and Elliot H Omiya, a Software Architect and audio guru, dig into the innerworkings of Vista's updated Audio Stack and new user mode API in the latest installment of the Going Deep series on Channel 9. Much of the guts of Windows audio have been moved up into the land of the user and this has consequences for both Windows audio developers at the API level and for Windows at the general programmability, reliability and stability levels.

Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR)

We just released a great video interview on Channel 9 that should be of tremendous interest to those of you who write managed threaded code: The Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) is a lightweight port-based concurrency library for C# 2.0 developed by George Chrysanthakopoulos in the Advanced Strategies group at Microsoft. Here, we have a deep discussion about CCR with George, a Software Architect, and Satnam Singh, Architect. You can get more info about CCR on the CCR Wiki. This is super cool stuff and represents a really innovative approach to making managed threaded programming more readily understandable and predictable.

Please check out the OOPSLA/SCOOL paper on the CCR.

Enjoy!

C

Channel 9 Shows

We just released a new "feature" on Channel 9: Shows. The Show concept is a way to categorize tightly-bound video interviews, podcasts, etc by creating a "content encapsulation structure" that contains Episodes. You know, the same thing they do on commercial TV. So far, we have Videos and Podcasts as show mediums, with 3 Shows, one episode each:

Going Deep: Singularity Revisited

WM_IN: Angela Mills: From UDDI to Indigo

ArcTalk: DSL and Software Factories

The number of episodes for Going Deep and WM_IN will increase tomorrow. More Shows are on the horizon.

One of the cool things about Shows is the Showroom: You don't have to leave where you are to watch all the episodes of a show. Oh yeah, another use of that cutting edge, five-year old technology they're calling AJAX... I won't start ranting here.

What kind of Show would you like to see?

C

Back on Earth: Going Deep on Channel 9

It's been a while since my last post, but in my opinion that's fine because I haven't had much to say. That said, I still don't that have too much to say, but I am going to say it anyway.

This year, I will be doing many more interviews for Channel 9 (and a lot less coding, which is good, but also a little strange, but I need to grow...). Going Deep will continue strong this year and I will be focusing primarily on Vista (but not exclusively by any means).

Yesterday, we sat down and talked with 4 Windows kernel architects about the state of Windows architecture today, what the Windows Architecture team is (and why), the challenges of functional dependencies and the overall impact they have on shipping frequency, the future of NT, Security and other fun OS topics. Windows is a wonderfully complex OS that is on track to get better and better, from a core architecture standpoint, with each iteration. The obvious benefit of a cohesive architecture with well-understood functional dependency boundaries, smart thread management (to name a few) is that Windows users will have a more reliable, stable, performant and safe operating system. Great discussion. You'll see it on Channel 9 in the near future as part of the Going Deep series.

I also recently interviewed the Singularity research team (again) and had a great (and deep) discussion with some super smart folks in MSR (Microsoft Research). The interviewees were The Usual Suspects, Galen Hall and Jim Larus, plus two new faces, Manuel Fahndrich and David Tarditi. They are doing some really great work over in MSRLand and it was fun to talk to four of the scientists working on the Singularity project. Singularity, it seems, is evolving nicely... Also, in this episode, you will learn how Singularity is designed and why design decisions were made (like whey they decided to stick with Threads when, theoretically, they didn't need to). I really enjoy talking to people who are orders of magnitude more educated than myself in the computer science domain, not mention much smarter! Wow. That was a great interview. Stay tuned to Channel 9...

There's plenty more upcoming from C9's Going Deep so please stay tuned. Also, I would love to hear from you about what technologies you'd like to learn more about, from a programmatic and architectural point of view. Also, let me know what types of content you'd like to see on Channel 9. How about having a dev talk about a chunk of code she's writing, explaining design decisions, gotchas, tricks, etc? Hmm. Wonder what our legal department would say about that one.

I plan on blogging more this year. But, I won't blog just to blog. Read my first blog post to see why.

(Hey, TypePad team, what's up with the formatting on my archived posts?)

Cheers,

C

Well, do you?
C