Dresden, Germany, 12–13 November 2003

The goal of this conference was to show and discuss future trends at Microsoft as well as upcoming research trends related to Microsoft and the Microsoft .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). Topics were Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Initiative, a preview into future versions of windows, an introduction to A#, Mobile IPV6, Phoenix, the next generation .NET optimization framework which will be the basis for code generation for all future Microsoft optimizing compilers, as well as activities on process modelling and managing.

Presentations abstract and material

Microsoft and Academia - Partnership in Innovation

Preview of Windows next version (Longhorn)
Richard Banks, Microsoft UK

Windows "Longhorn" enables user experiences beyond what is possible today. Learn about Microsoft's user-centred approach and philosophy that motivated these enhancements. In addition to describing our new user interface concepts, rationale, and reasoning, the presentation will go into more detail around the new storage experience, that allows people to more easily manage their files.

Vulnerability Analysis Using Attack Graphs
Jeannette Wing, Carnegie Mellon University

Attack graphs represent the ways in which an adversary can exploit vulnerabilities to break into a system.  System administrators analyze these attack graphs to understand where their system's weaknesses lie and to help decide which security measures will be effective to deploy.  In practice, attack graphs are produced manually by Red Teams.  Construction by hand, however, is tedious, error-prone, and impractical for attack graphs larger than a hundred nodes.  In this talk I present a technique, based on model checking, for generating attack graphs automatically.  I also describe two kinds of analyses of attack graphs that system administrators can perform in trading off one security measure for another.  This work is joint with Somesh Jha and Oleg Sheyner.

Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft
Gerold Huebner, Chief Security Officer Microsoft Germany
Neeraj Suri, University of Technology Darmstadt
Kai Rannenberg, University of Frankfurt

During this panel discussion, the ongoing work on Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft will be presented from different views. Gerold Huebner can give an overview on the activities from a German point of view. Prof. Suri is a member of the "Microsoft Research Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board" in Redmond. Prof. Rannenberg, a former researcher of the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge now owns the T-Mobile funded chair for M-Commerce in Frankfurt.

Using Phoenix in Software Research and Engineering
John Lefor, Microsoft Research
Shahrokh Mortazavi, Microsoft Corporation

Phoenix is the next generation .NET optimization framework which will be the basis for code generation for all future Microsoft optimizing compilers. In addition to being an optimizing backend for code generation, Phoenix is designed to support the implementation of static and dynamic software analysis tools using an extensible architecture. One of the major objectives of Phoenix is to offer this architecture in a package that is flexible enough to support research in various areas of software engineering. This talk will provide an overview of the design goals of Phoenix as well as insight into how the building block architecture of Phoenix can be leveraged in an academic software research environment. In addition we will discuss several of the ways that Phoenix will be made available to the research community for both development and as a shipping product.

Innovation knows no borders - Public-private partnership research and development in Europe
Dr. Gtz-Philip Brasche, European Microsoft Innovation Center 

The European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC), located in Aachen, NorthRhine-Westfalia, Germany. represents the company's latest commitment to fostering innovation in the region and adds an additional component to the research and development work Microsoft carries out worldwide. Created to foster public-private partnerships throughout Europe, the work at the EMIC will contribute information technology expertise to public-private partnership-based projects. Working together with academic institutions and industry partners, the EMIC will concentrate its efforts in security and privacy, mobility and wireless, Web services technologies and social concerns such as e-learning and e-health.

A#
Wolfram Schulte, Microsoft Research

A# is a behavioral specification language, tailored to provide meaning to .NET components. A# allows to specify the behavior of a method of a in two ways: Pre-postconditions describe the behavior of a method (property/delegate) declaratively by stating what is required before a method is called and what the method guarantees. Model programs describe the meaning of a method operationally by code.
The goal of A# is to be an effective tool for programmers while designing, debugging and testing .NET components. For instance A# comes with a test tool, that enables to generate conformance test suites from model programs and it also comes with a run time assertion checking, which allows A# models to be used as test oracles. In this talk I will describe some of A#'s new language features and I will dive into the theory and practice of the test tool. 

Shared Source Common Language Runtime Infrastructure, Past, present and future
Damien Watkins, Microsoft Research 

The Shard Source Common Language Infrastructure (SSCLI) is an implementation of the ECMA CLI specification that targets multiple platforms and is available as source code. The SSCLI therefore allows researches and students to examine and even modify the internals of an implementation of the CLI. In this talk we look at the history and the future of the SSCLI.

Mobile IPV6 on Windows
Greg O'Shea, Microsoft Research 

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) is a protocol that allows a network device to move between IPv6 networks without breaking existing connections and without having to change its well-known IP address. This may be of importance to future generations of mobile, wireless devices. MIPv6 is a relatively large protocol whose specification has taken over seven years and an unusual amount of effort to develop. It was approved by the IESG in July 2003. This talk describes the protocol and our experimental implementation for Windows (CE) which is  based on earlier collabration with the University of Lancaster.

J# in Academia
Brian Keller, Microsoft Corporation

Visual J# .NET can help teachers and students with existing Java-language curriculum utilize Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework for building great applications. This talk will explore the Java-language support that J# provides and how this conforms to the .NET Framework development model. We will also cover a brief introduction to the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET for those unfamiliar with those development tools. 

Curriculum Request for Proposal (RFP)
Tom Healy, Microsoft Research

XEN -Unifying Data, Tables and OO
Wolfram Schulte, Microsoft Research  

Web Services and Business Process Automation
Christof Sprenger, Microsoft Germany 

Given the fact that Web Services are being matured through GXA and industry initiatives this talk covers concepts to demonstrate the additional promising values of service based architectures. Other topics are Business Processes, Orchestration and Workflow in the .NET environment and modeling Business Protocols using BPEL.

Teaching Introductory Programming using C# and Rotor
Judith Bishop, University of Pretoria

Using the .NET Framework in University Courses  
Damien Watkins, Microsoft Research

Teaching software security: cases studies on the .NET Framework
Frank Piessens, Katholieke University Kuleuven 

As more and more software applications are directly or indirectly accessible from the Internet, the importance of the security of these applications grows steadily. Hence, it is important that university curricula for computer scientists and software engineers include courses on secure software development. Such courses should make students familiar with the programming language technology, runtime support and available API's for security, and they should also teach them how to use these technological means appropriately.

At the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, teaching materials for such a software security course have been developed over the past four years. The course teaches software security at a conceptual level, independent of specific implementations, but subsequently illustrates these concepts by discussing their implementations in the .NET Framework, the Java platform, the Windows operating system or other important system software and middleware.

In this talk, an overview of the contents of the software security course is given, and a number of example project assignments and case studies on the .NET Framework are presented.

Teaching Software Maintenance using .NET and Rotor
Len Bottaci, University of Hull

The talk describes the content and teaching of an MSc course on software maintenance.  The course covers the management and practice of maintaining large scale software (where no one person has a detailed overall knowledge), in the context of commercial constraints.  Strategies and techniques for understanding and navigating code are taught as is planning and cost estimation. An extensive team-based practical exercise is used to give the students experience.  The maintenance task is to modify the jscript compiler in the rotor source code.  Students maintain a logbook of activity and are taught to review their experience critically in order to identify areas for improvement.
 

Experiences teaching .NET
Johannes Heigert, Munich University of Applied Science
Andreas Polze, University of Potsdam