November 12th, 2009

PDC 2009: Tune in for our live blogging frenzy next week

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:31 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Big Brains, Multicore/distributed computing, Office 2010/Office 14, PDC 2009, Red Dog, Research, Silverlight (wpf/e), Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server")

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Professional Developers Conference Keynote, Blogging, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2009 kicks off the week of November 16. Like we did last year, a handful of us Microsoft watchers will be live blogging the keynotes as a group.

The PDC keynotes are slated for Tuesday November 17 from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. PT and Wednesday November 18 from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. We’ll be using CoverItLive to blog, so the more of you who chime in and comment along with us, the merrier. Your group-blogging hosts (besides me) will be Ed Bott, Kip Kniskern, Paul Thurrott, Rafael Rivera, Tom Warren and Long Zheng

Come back here next week and watch along with us as Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie; Server and Tools President Bob Muglia; Kurt DelBene, Senior VP of Microsoft’s Office Business Productivity Group and more talk about what’s coming for developers in the next year. (I’ll post the CoverItLive viewer on my site during keynote viewing hours next week.)

There will be new info on Microsoft’s Azure cloud operating environment, .Net 4.0, Oslo, Office 2010, Silverlight, SQL Server and more. And more than a few of the “Big Brains” — Microsoft’s Technical Fellows — are on tap to present during the four-day confab.  I’ve already posted about some of what’s on tap (and not on tap) for PDC 2009 over the past few weeks. Expect lots more PDC news on my blog throughout the week next week.

Hope to see you (virtually) and/or live in Los Angeles next week!

October 14th, 2009

Microsoft Big Brains: Terry Crowley

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:46 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Development tools, Microsoft Big Brains, Office

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows, Office Suites, Software, Operating Systems, Mary Jo Foley

Just before retiring from day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft in 2008, Chairman Bill Gates said that he expected Microsoft’s 22 Technical Fellows to get a lot more publicly visible — now that they wouldn’t be living in his shadow. While some of the Microsoft fellows already have been active on the public-speaking circuit, many of them are not widely known outside the company.

Last year I launched this series — “Microsoft Big Brains” — to help remedy that shortcoming. In the coming weeks, I am hoping to profile as many of the company’s tech fellows as to whom I can get access. Slowly but surely, I’m making my way through the list. After a hiatus this summer, the series is resuming.

Microsoft’s Technical Fellows came to the company via a variety of different routes. Some of them run divisions inside the company; some focus on particularly thorny technical issues that may span a variety of product units. Regardless of where they sit in the organization, the fellows all have been charged with helping Microsoft craft its next-gen products and strategies, much the way that Gates used his regular “Think Weeks” to prioritize what Microsoft needed to do next.

This Week’s ‘Big Brain’: Terry Crowley
Claim to Fame: Director of Development for Microsoft Office,
How Long You’ve Been With Microsoft: 12 years
More About You: Joined Microsoft as part of the Vermeer (FrontPage) acquisition. Has held a number of posts at Microsoft, including Group Development Manager for Office Authoring Services (Word/OneNote/Publisher/Text Services); and development lead for FrontPage HTML editor.
Your Biggest Accomplishment (So Far) at Microsoft: Being able to bring Rich Internet Application (RIA) ideas and concepts to Office
Team(s) You Also Work With: Windows, Windows Live
Why Stay at Microsoft? “I have the ability to build products that are being used by half a billion people. It’s an amazing opportunity and responsibility.”

When I think of Microsoft Office, I don’t think of it — or any of its component parts — as being Rich Internet Appliations (RIAs). But Microsoft Tech Fellow and Director of Development for Office Terry Crowley begs to differ.

“I’ve been building RIAs for over 25 years, starting when I was at BBN Labs,” Crowley says.

If RIA means complex multimedia apps, Office technically qualifies. Crowley talks about Office bringing applications to the Internet with high latency.  Sometimes Office apps are connected and other times disconnected.

“Outlook, OneNote — the model is online/offline. There’s an ‘always cached’ mode to help when connecting to remote resources,” Crowley points out.

Crowley has helped build all kinds of applications during his tech career, ranging from word processors, to spreadsheets, to e-mail, to real-time conferencing systems. He says that wide background has helped him interact with a wide variety of teams and individuals with different jobs across the company.

In his current role as Office development director, Crowley says his job is to “drive the (Office) project.” He oversees the setting of milestones and evaluates how the team is progressing against those milestones. He also is responsible for how Microsoft develops Office — how teams check in code, etc. All of these processes were forged under the former head of engineering for Office, Steven Sinofsky, who, in turn, has brought those methodologies to the Windows team, which he currently runs in his role as President, Crowley says.

The Office team is currently enmeshed (no pun intended) in building and finessing Office 2010, Office Web Apps and Office Mobile 2010. Office 2010 and Office Web Apps are expected to launch in May/June 2010 and a public beta of these two suites is expected in November 2009.

Going forward, the Office team’s processes and development work is likely to get even more complex.

“From a technical standpoint, there’s a lot of variability in the environment (where Office runs), and it’s going to get even more variable,” Crowley acknowledges. Will Office be running on a netbook? On a 64-bit core? On a wall-sized display? A four-inch touch-screen device?

“You need to write software that can span that set of technological underpinnings,” he says. “How do we write software that can scale in that fashion? There are lots of great challenges there.”

Compared to 25 years ago, “we have supercomputers on our desks, and we need to be clever about how to write software and tools” to take advantage of them, Crowley says.

But in typical Microsoft Office button-down fashion, he’s not willing to say anything more specific. So whatever Crowley and his team is already planning for Office 15 and beyond is still a mystery — for now.

For all of the “Microsoft Big Brains” profiles, check out the Big Brains page.

September 23rd, 2009

Windows 8: More early clues start to emerge

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:34 am

Categories: Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Management tools, Microsoft Big Brains, Red Dog, System Center, Utility/cloud computing, Windows 8, Windows 8 Server, Windows client, Windows server

Tags: Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft Corp., Chapman Co., Windows 8, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Servers, Software, Hardware, Mary Jo Foley

As soon as Microsoft releases the final bits of a new Windows release to manufacturing — and often before — many users’ thoughts turn to what’s next.

Windows 7 and its server complement, Windows Server 2008 R2, were released to manufacturing in late July. By late August, Microsoft’s Windows client unit already was turning the crank on Windows 8 client and server.

Anders Vindberg, a Microsoft Technical Fellow in Microsoft’s Management and Services division — a “Big Brains” interview with whom I’ll be posting soon — acknowledged that planning sessions were well underway for Windows 8. And of the 12 working groups created, “eight or nine revolve around management.” (Back in April of this year, Microsoft was seeking developers interested in working on some of these management features and enhancements to Distributed File System Replication for Windows 8.)

Stephen Chapman, a tech enthusiast who runs the UX Evangelist site, has been beating the bushes for a few months now for Windows 8 information. He recently unearthed a number of job profiles of folks who have worked on and are working on various elements which may or may not make it into the final Windows 8 release.

Chapman found listings regarding tweaks being made to the Hibernate/Resume/Integration programming interface “that can integrate and utilize the new TLZ file compression engine.” (I’m not really sure what TLZ means here. I found a reference to TLZ as a file extension for Tar (.TAR) file compressed with LZMA (.LZMA) file compression “most commonly used on Unix systems.”)

He also found a reference to more tweaks that Microsoft is making around kernel patch protection, via PatchGuard. Chapman blogged that, based on what he unearthed, “PatchGuard is apparently going to make life even a little more difficult for hackers (and anti-virus companies as well, perhaps).”

Things are happening on the Windows 8 Server front, too. It seems that the Dublin application server that Microsoft has been readying might find its way into Windows 8 Server, based on another online resume Chapman found. (Microsoft officials said last year that the grand plan for Dublin was to integrate it into Windows Server, but never said when.)

I’ve seen a few Windows 8 references out there focused around the server version that mention new functionality Microsoft is working on to make Windows 8 Server an even stronger datacenter operating system. That dovetails with Microsoft’s slow but steady push toward offering customers not just a public-cloud hosting capability, but also a private one. For Microsoft, a private cloud will revolve around Windows Server. Some of the features/functionality developed by the Windows Azure operating system (Red Dog) team will undoubtedly find their way back into future iterations of Windows Server.

It’s still early. Windows 8 is unlikely to debut until 2011, at the earliest, given the way Microsoft is delivering Windows releases these days. I’ll be interested as to how Microsoft execs characterize Windows 8, given they decided to deem Windows 7 a “major” release and Windows Server 2008 R2 a “minor” one.

Anyone else hearing any scuttlebutt yet on Windows 8? What are you hoping gets included in the next Windows client and server releases?

August 4th, 2009

Microsoft PDC 2009: What's on tap for developers this November?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 5:41 am

Categories: Azure, CRM Live/CRM Online, Channel, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, Live Mesh, Microsoft Big Brains, Multicore/distributed computing, Office 2010/Office 14, PDC 2009, Red Dog, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, Silverlight (wpf/e), Utility/cloud computing, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), WinHEC, Windows 7, Windows Mobile, Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server"), Windows client, Windows server

Tags: Developer, Microsoft Corp., WinHEC, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Mobile Operating Systems, Mobile Applications, Handhelds, Software, Hardware

Microsoft opened up registration for its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2009 on August 4. This year’s developer-fest is in Los Angeles again, as it was last year, and will run from November 16 to 19.

As it will be too early for Microsoft to start detailing publicly what’s coming in Windows 8, what will the Softies be highlighting at this year’s conference?

Keynotes are on tap from the elusive Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie and Server and Tools President Bob Muglia. (Other keynotes will be added to the agenda later this year, company officials said.) Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, is slated to go from beta to final around the time of the PDC. And Microsoft also plans to offer a number of sessions on its hosted-development strategy at the show, as well. (Think xRM, SharePoint Services, and other “utility computing” building blocks.) Sessions dedicated to SQL Azure, Microsoft’s hosted SQL Server service, also are on the agenda.

Even though Microsoft will have launched Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 less than a month before the PDC, on October 22, there will still be lots of sessions around developing for those platforms. Windows expert and Technical Fellow Marc Russinovich is on tap to talk about the kernel changes Microsoft made in Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2.

Russinovich isn’t the only “Big Brain” slated to speak at the confab. Other Microsoft Technical Fellows, including parallel-computing expert Burton Smith and database guru Dave Campbell are on the line-up, as well.

There is going to be a lot of content on .Net Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 (both of which are expected to launch around spring 2010, last I heard). Microsoft also is promising a “sneak peek” at some of the so-far unspecified new features in the next version of Silverlight (which I’d expect to be called Silverlight 4) during the PDC.

There are a few sessions dedicated to developing for SharePoint 2010 on the docket. There’s a session on “Office 2010 as a RAD (Rapid Application Development) platform.” I’m assuming this is Microsoft’s updated Office Business Applications (OBA) platform/strategy.

I asked Tim O’Brien, Director of Microsoft’s Platform Strategy Group, whether there would be much, if any, PDC content dedicated to developing for Windows Mobile. The first Windows Mobile 6.5 phones are set to launch in October and developers are champing at the bit for information on Windows Mobile 7.

“We are marching toward getting 6.5 out. That’s our focus right now,” is all O’Brien would say. In other words, guess we’ll have to wait and see if WinMo makes it onto the PDC agenda in any meaningful way.

I also asked O’Brien whether Microsoft was still planning to hold a Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) this year. Last year, Microsoft cancelled WinHEC.

“There’s no reason to say we won’t,” said O’Brien. But he also acknowledged he didn’t know for sure whether or when Microsoft would hold a WinHEC in 2009. Guess that’s another wait-and-see, too.

Microsoft is planning to Webcast the keynotes and many of the PDC sessions for those who can’t make the show in person. Me? I’m planning on making the cross-country trek myself to my favorite Microsoft show of the year.

June 9th, 2009

Microsoft Big Brains: Wael Bahaa-El-Din

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:58 pm

Categories: Corporate strategy, Microsoft Big Brains, Windows 7, Windows client, Windows server

Tags: Performance, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Just before retiring from day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft, Chairman Bill Gates said that he expected Microsoft’s 22 Technical Fellows to get a lot more publicly visible — now that they wouldn’t be living in his shadow. While some of the Microsoft fellows already have been active on the public-speaking circuit, many of them are not widely known outside the company.

Last year I launched this series — “Microsoft Big Brains” — to help remedy that shortcoming. In the coming weeks, I am hoping to profile as many of the company’s tech fellows as to whom I can get access.

Microsoft’s Technical Fellows came to the company via a variety of different routes. Some of them run divisions inside the company; some focus on particularly thorny technical issues that may span a variety of product units. Regardless of where they sit in the organization, the fellows all have been charged with helping Microsoft craft its next-gen products and strategies, much the way that Gates used his regular “Think Weeks” to prioritize what Microsoft needed to do next.

This Week’s ‘Big Brain’: Wael Bahaa-El-Din
Claim to Fame: “Mr. Quality” on the  core Windows team. He has done work in the Center of Excellence for Quality at the company and is overseeing the “Quality Quest” for Windows and Microsoft.
How Long You’ve Been With Microsoft: 15 years
More About You: Leads the Windows Engineering System and Services organization inside Microsoft’s Core Operating System Division (COSD), and is focused on improving Windows’ performance, reliability and overall application experience. Like so many Windows engineers, joined Microsoft from Digital Equipment Corp., where he focused on database performance and scalability, which included operating system and hardware performance.
Your Biggest Accomplishment (So Far) at Microsoft: Helped make Windows Server a recognized enterprise-ready operating system that was able to compete with servers running NetWare, Unix and other server operating systems. “We were a very modest platform 15 years ago. Now we can match the performance of mainframes,” Bahaa-El-Din says.
Team(s) You Also Work With: Windows client, Windows Server, Office
Why Stay at Microsoft? “I have different problems (to solve) all the time,” he says. Plus, “what we do impacts millions of people… there are 1.2 billion (Windows) users in the world.”

At Microsoft, it takes a lot of people to develop and deliver an operating system. I’ve seen estimates of there being more than 5,000 developers on Windows client alone. So it’s not surprising that many of these individuals — even ones with serious pedigrees and far-reaching contributions — are behind-the-scenes types.

Technical Fellow Wael Bahaa-El-Din is one of these contributors. I’d never heard of Bahaa-El-Din prior to having a chance to interview him. Yet this is someone who has more than 1,200 individuals  working for him in the Windows Fundamentals Group. Bahaa-El-Din reports to Jon DeVaan, the head of Microsoft’s Core Operating System Division (COSD). He and his team touch many back-room aspects of Windows’ development, from the daily builds, to the testing and development tools, to the oversight of the release criteria, to “serviceability” (the release and delivery of updates and service packs).

Currently, Bahaa-El-Din is completely focused on seeing Windows 7 through to release-to-manufacturing (RTM). (After that, he’ll “see what’s next” for him, he says.)

“The goal is having a great build every day that is self-hostable. Its performance and compatibility needs to be very good,” he says.

Because of the sheer scale of Windows (there are 1.2 billion Windows users out there, and counting, Bahaa-El-Din says), innovations are important throughout the development, testing and fedback processes. With about 1.5 million Windows 7 beta testers out there, many of which are submitting bug reports, “we need to be able to fix their problems in just a few months.” Add to that the feedback from users of the 62,000 machines that are self-hosting Windows 7 inside Microsoft right now, and the magnitude of Bahaa-El-Din’s charter becomes quickly apparent.

Bahaa-El-Din spearheads Microsoft’s quality-improvement processes for Windows client. “Quality,” in this case, has a very specific meaning: It refers to the reliability, performance, compatibility, acessability — all of those amorphous “qualities,” which, collectively, distinguish a “good” operating-system release from a not-so-good one. The new level of discipline Microsoft has brought to Windows 7, compared to previous Windows releases — in terms of planning, feature cuts/check-ins, ecosystem readiness– falls, in part, on Bahaa-El-Din, as well.

“With a system as big as Windows, things still need to seem automatic,” he notes. “User questions need immediate answers. Problems need to be fixed in a reliable manner.”

Yet there’s no magic “quality bullet” which makes all this happen. Instead, it’s Bahaa-El-Din’s job to make quality improvements magically appear.

For all of the “Microsoft Big Brains” profiles, check out the Big Brains page.

April 23rd, 2009

Microsoft Big Brains: Burton Smith

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:55 am

Categories: Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Microsoft Big Brains, Multicore/distributed computing, Research

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Multi-core, Mary Jo Foley

Just before retiring from day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft, Chairman Bill Gates said that he expected Microsoft’s 22 Technical Fellows to get a lot more publicly visible — now that they wouldn’t be living in his shadow. While some of the Microsoft fellows already have been active on the public-speaking circuit, many of them are not widely known outside the company.

Last year I launched this series — “Microsoft Big Brains” — to help remedy that shortcoming. In the coming weeks, I am hoping to profile as many of the company’s tech fellows as to whom I can get access.

Microsoft’s Technical Fellows came to the company via a variety of different routes. Some of them run divisions inside the company; some focus on particularly thorny technical issues that may span a variety of product units. Regardless of where they sit in the organization, the fellows all have been charged with helping Microsoft craft its next-gen products and strategies, much the way that Gates used his regular “Think Weeks” to prioritize what Microsoft needed to do next.

This Week’s ‘Big Brain’: Burton Smith
Claim to Fame: High-performance computing and parallel-computing expert
How Long You’ve Been With Microsoft: 3 years
More About You: Joined Microsoft from Cray, where he was chief scientist and a member of the Board of Directors. (In 1988, founded Tera Computer Co. — which ended up buying some of the research assets of Cray in 2000.)
Your Biggest Accomplishment (So Far) at Microsoft: “Getting the boat to turn” in terms of building a shared consensus inside Microsoft about the importance and inevitability of the transition to many-core/parallel computing
Team(s) You Also Work With: Windows, Developer Division, Microsoft Research
Why Stay at Microsoft? “Microsoft is the platform company….This is ground zero of the new world of computing….Microsoft has a duty to help solve the (parallel/multicore) computing problem.”

Microsoft currently has many efforts across the company — in product groups, research and incubation labs — that are focused on making programming and operating parallel and multicore systems easier. It wasn’t long ago, however, that Microsoft was on the sidelines in the many core/multicore space.

“Back when I joined Microsoft (in 2006), some (Softies) said we should just tell AMD and Intel to stop doing this” (move to multicore architectures) Technical Fellow Burton Smith recalled.

One of Smith’s first charters, when he was hired by Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie, was to evangelize the importance of adapting to parallel/multicore planning and thinking across the entire company.

“I talk to people a lot across the company and try to convince them what the right thing to do is, in terms of making parallel computing a success,” Smith said. And he isn’t talking just about in high-performance servers; he also is focused on what this shift in architecture will mean in client systems (like Windows 7), mobile phones and distributed services.

In all of these cases, it’s important to architect software so that it allows work to be done on the right platform and/or in the right moment to take advantages of the advances that parallelism brings. But Microsoft’s biggest challenge here is its substantial installed base in both operating systems and tools, Smith said.

“We are a canonical software platform. The really tough problem is legacy and how to replace it with something else,” he acknowledged. (Burton didn’t mention Microsoft’s next-generation MIdori project here, but I’d bet that’s one of the areas he was thinking of when he made this comment….)

Unlike some of the other Microsoft Technical Fellows, Smith isn’t assigned to one particular team or group. He is focused on working with individuals, rather than on specific products, he said.

“I’m interested in anything in the parallel computing arena,” he explained. “I generate a fair number of ideas per day and have a tremendous memory. I know what’s out there” in the parallel-computing universe.

Smith admitted that Microsoft still has a long road ahead, even though it has introduced some rudimentary tools and is planning to deliver more parallel-processing support via tools like Visual Studio 2010 (expected to ship before the end of calendar 2009).

“Internally, we are leading. In the marketplace, we are not. We have parity” with where other companies are, in terms of their support for parallelism and multi-core, he contended. “But a lot of people are counting on us. And we have (products and technologies) that will help advance things along.”

For all of the “Microsoft Big Brains” profiles, check out the Big Brains page.

March 9th, 2009

Microsoft Big Brains: Mark Russinovich

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 1:37 pm

Categories: Code names, Corporate strategy, Microsoft Big Brains, Multicore/distributed computing, Research, Windows 7, Windows client, Windows server

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Russinovich Claim, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Just before retiring from day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft, Chairman Bill Gates said that he expected Microsoft’s 22 Technical Fellows to get a lot more publicly visible — now that they wouldn’t be living in his shadow. While some of the Microsoft fellows already have been active on the public-speaking circuit, many of them are not widely known outside the company.

Last year I launched this series — “Microsoft Big Brains” — to help remedy that shortcoming. In the coming weeks, I am hoping to profile as many of the company’s tech fellows as to whom I can get access.

Microsoft’s Technical Fellows came to the company via a variety of different routes. Some of them run divisions inside the company; some focus on particularly thorny technical issues that may span a variety of product units. Regardless of where they sit in the organization, the fellows all have been charged with helping Microsoft craft its next-gen products and strategies, much the way that Gates used his regular “Think Weeks” to prioritize what Microsoft needed to do next.

This Week’s ‘Big Brain’: Mark Russinovich
Claim to Fame: “I’ve influenced Windows 7 and Server, but not yet had the time to influence the tech direction.”
How Long You’ve Been With Microsoft: 2.5 years
More About You: One of the foremost experts — inside or outside Microsoft — on the inner workings of Windows. Cofounder (in 1996) of Winternals Software  — a company which Microsoft acquired in 2006. Also cofounded Sysinternals.com, for which he’s written dozens of Windows utilities, including Filemon, Regmon, Process Explorer, Rootkit Revealer and more. Prior to that, was a resarcher at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center, specializing in operating-system support for Web-server acceleration.
Your Biggest Accomplishment (So Far) at Microsoft: “I have started discussions across groups (at Microsoft) about coordinating more on Windows.”
Team(s) You Also Work With: Developer Division, Windows Mobile, Windows Server, Windows Experience Division (WEX)
Why Stay at Microsoft? Russinovich said he’s been tinkering with things like how to disassemble ROM since the ninth grade. His whole background and focus is operating systems. Windows “is the most important operating system — it has the biggest impact.” And the best way to help influence its direction is to be at Microsoft, he said.

Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich knows Windows. And since joining Microsoft, he’s made it his business to help herd the cats inside the company who have anything to do with Windows’ development and futures.

Russinovich currently reports to Jon DeVaan, the head of Microsoft’s Core Operating Systems Division. He is more of an “individual contributor” tech fellow than one who leads teams. He does a lot of speaking, blogging, article and code writing, rather than managing. (In all his “free time,” he’s working on the fifth edition of Windows Internals, due out in May 2009.

Russinovich takes pride in being part of a core group of senior architects at the company working on architectural best practices. The group is working on an architectural “constitution” which outlines the layers in Windows (along with the functionality in each layer) and guidance on application-programming interface (API) design.

“We ask teams to come in and make sure there’s no overlap — to make sure we’re not duplicating things,” Russinovich explained.

Russinovich characterized his role as helping to facilitate “dialog and cross divisional cooperation” around Windows. I asked for further details as to what this involves and how it will show up in future Windows releases, but he said he was unable to share more because the particulars are NDA.

(Russinovich is said to be the leader of the still-unannounced Microsoft MinSafe project, which is considered by some of my sources to be a milestone on the way to Midori, an incubation project that could ultimately become Microsoft’s next-generation distributed, multicore operating system.)

What can Russinovich discuss, in terms of his near- and longer-term hot buttons?

He is involved in the development of MinWin, the Windows core that is part of Windows 7 (and will be in future iterations of Windows). He is always thinking about Windows’ evolution, he said. And he’s continuing to work on the Windows Sysinternals tools, both in terms of enhancing existing utilities and creating new ones, like a new memory footprint analysis tool for developers that he’s been working on. (Russinovich called his Sysinternals work “a hobby” for him.)

“There’s a lot of work to do in the Windows 8 timeframe,” Russinovich said. “We’re thinking now about what steps we should be taking.”

For all of the “Microsoft Big Brains” profiles, check out the Big Brains page.

February 11th, 2009

Microsoft Big Brains: Patrick Dussud

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:16 am

Categories: Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Microsoft Big Brains, Windows client

Tags: Microsoft Corp., CLR, RedHawk, .Net, Middleware, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Enterprise Software, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Just before retiring from day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft, Chairman Bill Gates said that he expected Microsoft’s 22 Technical Fellows to get a lot more publicly visible — now that they wouldn’t be living in his shadow. While some of the Microsoft fellows already have been active on the public-speaking circuit, many of them are not widely known outside the company.

Last year I launched this series — “Microsoft Big Brains” — to help remedy that shortcoming. In the coming weeks, I am hoping to profile as many of the company’s tech fellows as to whom I can get access.

Microsoft’s Technical Fellows came to the company via a variety of different routes. Some of them run divisions inside the company; some focus on particularly thorny technical issues that may span a variety of product units. Regardless of where they sit in the organization, the fellows all have been charged with helping Microsoft craft its next-gen products and strategies, much the way that Gates used his regular “Think Weeks” to prioritize what Microsoft needed to do next.

This Week’s ‘Big Brain’: Patrick Dussud
Claim to Fame: Instrumental in developing language runtime architectures for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), VBscript, Jscript, Microsoft Java and the .Net CLR. He also has designed all of the garbage collectors Microsoft has shipped as part of its dev tools.
How Long You’ve Been With Microsoft: 15 years
More About You: Started out working on Lisp runtimes at Schlumberger and Texas Instrumentsand on programming environments at Lucid Software
Your Biggest Accomplishment (So Far) at Microsoft: Chief architect for Microsoft’s .Net Common Language Runtime (CLR) and .Net Framework, which “has the most influence on the dev community at large and a great impact on people” in general
Team(s) You Also Work With: Developer division, Windows Core Architecture group
Why Stay at Microsoft? “The excitement of new projects and the challenges of new things dovetail neatly.”

Microsoft Technical Fellow Patrick Dussud is working on the next big thing involving the Common Language Runtime (CLR), the core runtime engine at the heart of Microsoft’s .Net Framework. Unfortunately, he isn’t at liberty to say exactly what the next big thing is.

(My sources claim Dussud is the head of the still-under-wraps Microsoft “RedHawk” project that is in the incubation phase. RedHawk is expected to be less ambitious but also a lot less bulky than the current CLR. Sources say the RedHawk team is building tools and plumbing that are likely to be the foundation of Midori, Microsoft’s next-gen distributed multicore operating system that also is an incubation project at this point.)

Dussud declined to comment on RedHawk. Instead, he talked in vague terms about what he’s working on now.

Unsurprisingly, Dussud is focused on the future of the CLR and .Net. He said he’s also “deeply involved” in the Windows Core Architecture Group, which is dedicated to Windows futures.

“My next project involves riding the wave of the new trends, form factors, multicore” and the like, he said. Dussud said he’s quite interested in the cloud and Web-computing paradigms, as well as how Microsoft can better address the designer-developer split. In the parallel and multiprocessing space, specifically, the CLR and the operating system need to be tuned internally for scalability, “a focus area of mine for a while now.”

Dussud said he prefers working as part of multiple teams, rather than managing people.

“I am happy to keep a low profile” while working on runtime futures, Dussud said.

Dussud recalled he was nervous when he first moved to Redmond from the Bay Area. He noticed the cultural differences between individual Microsoft teams with their different perspectives on how best to solve various problems. But he discovered Microsoft was “like the Bay Area, in terms of richness in what you can learn every day.”

Dussud is keeping so busy that he still hasn’t had the time to take the sabbatical for which he became eligible six years ago, he said. “I’ve never been ‘in between’ projects,” he said. And that’s the way he likes it.

For all of the “Microsoft Big Brains” profiles, check out the Big Brains page.

January 16th, 2009

Microsoft Big Brains: Chuck Thacker

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:41 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Microsoft Big Brains, Multicore/distributed computing, Research, Xbox

Tags: PC, Microsoft Corp., Computer, Chuck Thacker, BEE3, Productivity, Game Players, Desktops, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology

Just before retiring from day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft, Chairman Bill Gates said that he expected Microsoft’s 22 Technical Fellows to get a lot more publicly visible — now that they wouldn’t be living in his shadow. While some of the Microsoft fellows already have been active on the public-speaking circuit, many of them are not widely known outside the company.

Last year I launched this series — “Microsoft Big Brains” — to help remedy that shortcoming. In the coming weeks, I am hoping to profile as many of the company’s tech fellows as to whom I can get access.

Microsoft’s Technical Fellows came to the company via a variety of different routes. Some of them run divisions inside the company; some focus on particularly thorny technical issues that may span a variety of product units. Regardless of where they sit in the organization, the fellows all have been charged with helping Microsoft craft its next-gen products and strategies, much the way that Gates used his regular “Think Weeks” to prioritize what Microsoft needed to do next.

This Week’s ‘Big Brain’: Chuck Thacker
Claim to Fame: Helped establish Microsoft’s Cambridge, UK, research lab and, later, worked on developing the first hardware prototype for the Tablet PC.
How Long You’ve Been With Microsoft: 11 years
More About You: Before Microsoft, worked for Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and the Digital Equipment Systems Research Center. Was chief designer on Alto, “the first personal computer to use a bit-mapped display and mouse.” In 2004, received the Charles Stark Draper Prize for the development of the first networked, distributed PC. In 2007, received the IEEE John Von Neumann medal.
Your Biggest Accomplishment (So Far) at Microsoft: Helping to develop and make available to academics field-programmable gate-array (FPGA) technology.
Team(s) You Also Work With: Microsoft Research, Windows, Xbox, Dryad (parallel/distributed system management).
Why Stay at Microsoft? “Leverage. You have the opportunity to do game-changing things.”

Over the last 15 years, computer architecture research has gotten really boring, according to Microsoft Technical Fellow Chuck Thacker.

Back in the heyday, “if you wanted to build a new computer, you could. But now the cost of building a chip is astronomical — it’s kind of like building an operating system,” Thacker said.

That’s why Thacker is focused on helping build field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which are semiconductors that can be custom-configured after they’re manufactured. Thacker is teaming with other industry and academic researchers on the Research Accelerator for Multiple Processors (RAMP) consortium.

One of Thacker’s pet project’s, the BEE3 (Berkeley Emulation Engine version 3) — a four-FPGA system that is used for computer architecture research and is a target for RAMP — is starting to be licensed to academics and businesses so they can prototype all kinds of hardware platforms more cheaply. BEE3 is designed to help researchers more quickly prototype processors with hundreds or even thousands of cores and figure out new ways to program these massively parallel processors. The latest version of BEE3 was designed with a lot of help from Microsoft and contract manufacturer Celestica. Celestica also builds a lot of Microsoft’s Xbox 360s, Thacker said.)

Read the rest of this entry »

December 17th, 2008

Microsoft Big Brains: Anders Hejlsberg

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:08 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Development tools, Microsoft Big Brains, Oslo, PDC 2008, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii")

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Programming, C#, .Net, Programming Languages, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Mary Jo Foley

Just before retiring from day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft, Chairman Bill Gates said that he expected Microsoft’s 22 Technical Fellows to get a lot more publicly visible — now that they wouldn’t be living in his shadow. While some of the Microsoft fellows already have been active on the public-speaking circuit, many of them are not widely known outside the company.

I’ve launched this series — “Microsoft Big Brains” — to help remedy that shortcoming. In the coming weeks, I am hoping to profile as many of the company’s tech fellows as to whom I can get access.

Microsoft’s Technical Fellows came to the company via a variety of different routes. Some of them run divisions inside the company; some focus on particularly thorny technical issues that may span a variety of product units. Regardless of where they sit in the organization, the fellows all have been charged with helping Microsoft craft its next-gen products and strategies, much the way that Gates used his regular “Think Weeks” to prioritize what Microsoft needed to do next.

This Week’s ‘Big Brain’: Anders Hejlsberg
Claim to Fame: The inventor of the C# programming language (”and the steward of it for about ten years now”)
How Long You’ve Been With Microsoft: 12 years
More About You: Before joining Microsoft, was one of the original employees of Borland, where he authored Turbo Pascal. (He also was the chief architect of its successor, Delphi.)  At Microsoft, was key in helping create the .Net Framework, Visual J++ and the Windows Foundation Classes.
Your Biggest Accomplishment (So Far) at Microsoft: “It’s been satisfying to be at the right place at the right time to create an important part of our development infrastructure.”
Team(s) You Also Work With: Still working daily with the C# and .Net teams, as well as various groups within the Connected Systems Division (which is “building a whole infrastructure on top of .Net”), SQL Server and Microsoft Research.
Why Stay at Microsoft? “I love working with smart people and being challenged. I also like working on stuff that’s relevant. That’s my adrenaline shot.”

Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg is a guy who likes to see his projects through.

Currently, Hejlsberg is very focused at the moment on the next version of C#, known as C# 4.0. He is still the Chief Architect in charge of the product.

Microsoft shared a first tech preview build of C# 4.0 in late October. On the C# 4.0 new features list: Dynamic look-up; better COM interoperability; and more. And because language taxonomies are dying out, Hejlsberg said it’s not strange that C# 4.0 will borrow from and be heavily influenced by  dynamic languages. (C# 3.0 was more influenced by functional programming languages.)

His C# focus aside, Hejlsberg also is thinking ahead about bigger programming trends and technologies beyond his beloved C#. One of these is the concept of “metaprogramming.”

“Metaprograms are programs that manipulate themselves or other programs as data,” Hejlsberg explained. “They automate the act of programming and are closely aligned with DSLs (Domain-Specific Languages). Code generation is the poor man’s term for this, but it really doesn’t do it justice.”

Read the rest of this entry »