Microsoft Research Academic Days: Oslo 2004 04 20-22

Biography: Behrooz Chitsaz Joined Microsoft in October 1991 as a program manager in the Messaging Business Unit. During the 6 years in that division Behrooz was responsible for the directory services and the security features of Microsoft Exchange and a number of email gateways. In March 1997 Behrooz was appointed the Group program manager for the Windows Server Directory Services (Active Directory). Behrooz joined Microsoft Research in March 2001 and is currently responsible for strategic activities.

Abstract: With over 700 employees in the Research division and 5 labs around the world, the research division at Microsoft is chartered with driving innovation into Microsoft products. This talk will give an overview of Microsoft research, the technology, social and industry trends that are driving Microsoft Research projects, some current projects and the process and challenges in transferring research technology into products.

R&D at Microsoft

Walter Smith

Biography: Walter Smith is a Senior Architect in the Windows User Experience team, currently working on Windows Longhorn storage and communications features. In his eight years at Microsoft he has contributed to Internet Explorer, the Windows Shell, and MSN Explorer. Previously he was at Apple Computer where he was a major contributor on the Newton project. Walter has a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Abstract: As hard drives grow ever larger, and new data types like digital music and photos proliferate, traditional file systems don't do enough to help users deal with their data. Windows Longhorn provides a new user experience for organizing, searching, and sharing data, based on a new storage system derived from both file system and database technologies. Learn about Microsoft's approach and the philosophy that motivated these exciting enhancements.

The Storage User Experience in Windows "Longhorn"

Alexander Vaschillo

Biography: Alexander Vaschillo has been working in the database area since 1995, when he joined High Performance Database Research Center in Miami, Florida which he managed until early 2000. In his role of a Lead Program Manager for Microsoft SQL Server he led the design and development of SQL Server XML functionality (SQLXML, SQL Server Web Services Toolkit), contributed to the design of WinFS, and database schemas for several Windows application domains. Alexander is a recipient of a number of excellence awards in Computer Science, holds multiple patents in the database modelling area, is a member of ACM and IEEE societies, has M.S. in Mathematics from St. Petersburg State University, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Florida International University.

Abstract: Some of the biggest advances in database technology are nowadays happening in the areas other than relational optimizations, transactions, and query processing. This talk shows a number of new developments undertaken in SQL Server since the last release. Different ways to implement XML functionality in relational databases are explained (XML Datatype, SQLXML). New programming models for both server side (SQLCLR) and client side (Web Services) development are described. A new database-based file system (WinFS) that allows better data integration and more efficient data querying is introduced.

Next in Database Development: XML, .NET, WinFS

Steven Adler

Biography: Steven Adler is Senior Security Strategist for Microsoft EMEA HQ. In this role he is responsible for the trustworthy computing initiatives throughout EMEA, in particular focussing on security threats and countermeasures, security technologies and directory and identity management solutions. Before moving to Europe, Steven held a number of positions at Microsoft Corp in Redmond including product and program management. As a member of the Windows Server product marketing division, Steven was responsible for managing relationships with IT Analysts and was involved in the Windows 2000 and Windows 2000 Datacenter product launch events and in product planning for Windows Datacenter Server. Prior to his role in product management, Steven was a program manager in the Windows 2000 project where he was a member of the Active Directory design team and was responsible for the Active Directory management and diagnostic tools, localization and disaster recovery features.

Abstract: This session will outline an end to end security architecture that supports an in-depth defence strategy. By combining security features present across the network, perimeter, host, application and data layers, it is possible to build a secure application that mitigates many classes of attacks. The session will discuss the role of secure networking protocols, authentication, authorization, auditing, encryption, management in building resilient applications.

End To End Application Security

Dag Johansen

Biography: Dag Johansen is a professor in and the current chair of the Department of Computer Science, University of Troms, Norway. His research interest is distributed computer systems, currently focusing on pervasive distributed systems and implementations. In 1987, he co-founded the StormCast project, which constructed and deployed wide-area distributed sensor network systems in the Arctic for weather and pollution monitoring. StormCast was one of the pioneering distributed sensor networks, with one version alive on the Internet since February 1993 (http://weather.cs.uit.no). Johansen was one of the chief architects on the TACOMA (Troms And COrnell Moving Agents) project (http://www.tacoma.cs.uit.no), which he co-founded during his first sabbatical year at Cornell University in 1993/94. He was also visiting professor at Cornell in 1998/99. Johansen is one of the chief architects on the Norwegian-US (University of Troms, Cornell University, and UC San Diego) WAIF project (http://www.waif.cs.uit.no).

Abstract: This talk will focus on how the next generation pervasive Internet can be made programmable and extensible with personalized, mobile software. Our goal is to replace the old, time-consuming pull-based Internet, with a pervasive, push-based one delivering high-precision, context sensitive information in a timely manner. Hence, we attempt to structure future generation distributed systems so that we get computers as much as possible out of the (visible) human loop. The infrastructure we conjecture for this proactive web service environment is extremely asymmetric. On the traditional server side is an integrated environment saturated seamlessly with computers, sensors and communication facilities. A typical client is a user moving about with his handheld or wearable computing devices interacting with this environment. This implies that the user environments should be moved along the trajectory of the user.

Towards Next Generation Pervasive Internet

Damien Watkins

Biography: Damien Watkins is a member of the University Relations team at Microsoft Research Cambridge. His major area of responsibility is the adoption of .NET related technologies in research and teaching within EMEA. Before joining MSR, Damien founded and managed his own software consulting company called Project 42. Before starting Project 42 Damien was a lecturer at the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He taught subjects at both the postgraduate and undergraduate levels. He has also lectured for a semester at both Uppsala University (Sweden) and King Mongkut's Institute of Technology (Thailand). Component architectures that provide language interoperability have always held a keen interest for Damien, and he has written a paper titled "Handling Language Interoperability with the Microsoft .NET Framework" on this topic, describing how it is achieved within the Common Language Runtime. Damien has also co-authored a paper with Sebastian Lange titled "An Overview of Security in the .NET Framework" which describes some of the security features in the .NET Framework. His first book, co-authored with Mark Hammond and Brad Abrams, "Programming in the .NET Environment" describes the goals and architecture of the .NET Framework. Damien's PhD thesis, titled "Adding Contracts to Interface Definition Languages", dealt with improving the semantic quality of component architectures. Damien's best known publication from this area was with Antoine Beugnard, Jean-Marc Jzquel and Nol Plouzeau, a paper titled Making Components Contract Aware. Damien has presented tutorials, seminars and workshops on COM/DCOM, CORBA and the .NET Framework at numerous locations, including OOPSLA 2003, OOPSLA 2002, SIGCSE 2002, the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2001 (USA), ObjectWorld 1998 (Australia), TOOLS Pacific (Australia), TOOLS Europe (France), TOOLS East Europe (Bulgaria) and TOOLS Asia (China).

SSCLI: Past, Present and Future

Peter Andersen

Biography: Peter Andersen (http://www.daimi.au.dk/~datpete) is an academic researcher at the Computer Science Department of the University of Aarhus, Denmark (http://www.daimi.au.dk). Peter is affiliated with the research group on object-oriented languages, and has been researching and implementing programming languages, compilers, run-time systems, garbage-collectors etc. since his M.Sc. in Computer Science in 1992 from the University of Aarhus. As a co-owner and periodically employee of the IT consulting company Mjlner Informatics A/S (http://www.mjolner.com), Peter has had the role of technical lead in industry projects ranging from instruction set simulators and JITters to computer graphics.

Abstract: BETA is an object-oriented programming language from the Scandinavian school of object-orientation starting with the Simula languages. Simula was developed at the Norwegian Computing Center, Oslo, in the 1960s. One of the original designers of Simula, the late professor Kristen Nygaard, University of Oslo, was a co-designer of BETA together with Bent Bruun Kristensen, Ole Lehrmann Madsen and Birger Mller-Pedersen. BETA is among others characterized by powerful abstraction mechanisms. This includes the pattern concept, which a.o. unifies class and method. The notion of virtual pattern generalizes virtual procedure (method) and provides a virtual class concept that supports generic classes. Native compilers for BETA exist for a number of platforms, including: Macintosh, Apollo, Hewlett-Packard, SUN Sparc, Linux, and Windows. Recently work has been going on to port BETA to the bytecode based platforms of SUN Java and Microsoft .NET. This talk will demonstrate some of the issues involved in making a "nice" mapping of BETA to the CLR of .NET. The talk will illustrate some of the benefits of working in a multi-language environment like .NET, but will also try to illustrate some of the challenges one is confronted with, when trying to port an existing language to the common language runtime platform. The talk will conclude by outlining our plans to continue the work in the context of ROTOR/sscli. BETA is described in detail in the book "Object-Oriented Programming in the BETA Programming Language" by Ole Lehrmann Madsen, Birger Mller-Pedersen, Kristen Nygaard, Addison-Wesley, June 1993, ISBN 0-201-62430-3; in PDF: ftp://ftp.mjolner.com/BETA/BOOK/betabook.pdf. See also http://www.daimi.au.dk/~beta.

Porting BETA to .NET

Erik Meijer

Biography: You might know me as the "Head In The Box" from the wildly popular VBTV show, as "Professor ILDasm" from a series that never went beyond the first pilot episode, but my real job is technical lead in the WebData group at Microsoft. Prior to joining Microsoft I was an associate professor at Utrecht University and adjunct professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute in Portland. I am one of the proud designers of the standard lazy functional programming language Haskell98. My holy grail is to hide complicated mechanisms behind simple abstractions. Programming languages are an ideal medium to achieve this, and I am continuously looking for widely used APIs and often occurring programming pattern boilerplate to promote into first class language features. Currently my targets are XML and SQL, and asynchronous concurrent programming.

Abstract: In "Whidbey", the Visual C# language will be extended with a variety of constructs across a broad spectrum of research and industry languages. These new features include generics for improved code reuse (designed and implemented by Microsoft Research Cambridge), iterators to simplify implementation of enumerator patterns, and anonymous methods to ease working with delegates, and partial types to simplify development and code maintenance.

C# 2.0

Gavin Bierman

Biography: Gavin Bierman is a researcher in the Programming Principles and Tools Group in Microsoft Research, Cambridge. Prior to joining Microsoft he was a lecturer at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory (2000-2004), and a fellow and Director of Studies in Computer Science at St Johns College, Cambridge. He has also been an SERC Research Fellow (1993-1995), a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (1995-1999) and a lecturer at Warwick University (1999-2000). He took his PhD at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and read Computer Science as an undergraduate at Imperial College, London.

Presentation: C omega

Peter Drayton

SSCLI Review

Damien Watkins

Multi-language Programming in .NET

Gary Moulton

Biography: As the assistive technology relations product manager, Gary is responsible for coordinating Microsoft's marketing efforts with assistive technology manufacturers, and he is the manager of Microsoft's Assistive Technology Vendor Program (MATvp). He is co-author of Accessible Technology in Today's Business: Case Studies for Success (MSPress 2002). Prior to working for Microsoft he was Manager of Disability Solutions at Apple Computer, Inc. Gary was trained as a clinician and has worked for children and adults with disabilities. He taught child growth and development at the undergraduate and graduate level. Gary has his doctorates in education and business administration.

Abstract: To date there have been a number of government-based (i.e. laws, regulations) efforts to insure that individuals with disabilities have equal access to information technology and electronic office equipment. In addition, disability-specific advocates/organizations have called attention to the benefits of research and universal design in increasing the number of product options (i.e. hardware and software assistive technology) available to computer users with disabilities. In spite of all the efforts expended, the majority of individuals who could use technology to be more independent at home, at work, at school and at play, don't. As a result, there is still much work to do, but it is work that might have to be done differently. This presentation will provide a detailed examination of the latest research into the accessibility-related needs of computer users, proposed technology architecture that may be used to provide seamless access for all and a way of addressing the problem and meeting the needs.

Providing Access: Innovation for Society

Torben Weis, Andreas Ulbrich

Biography: Torben Weis is a PhD student at the Berlin University of Technology. His research interests are in CASE tools, model transformation, and QoS-aware component systems. He holds a masters (Diplom-Informatiker) in computer science from the Goethe University of Frankfurt. Contact him at Sekretariat EN6, Einsteinufer 17, 10587 Berlin, Germany; weis@ivs.tu-berlin.de.
Andreas Ulbrich is a PhD student at the Berlin University of Technology. His research interests are middleware, event-based communication, and adaptive systems. He holds a masters degree (Diplom-Informatiker) in computer science from the Chemnitz University of Technology. Contact him at Sekretariat EN6, Einsteinufer 17, 10587 Berlin, Germany; ulbi@ivs.tu-berlin.de.

Abstract: We present a visual robot development kit (VRDK) that tremendously eases the development of robot control applications in .NET. Our approach follows the model-driven paradigm. Thus, applications are modelled using a high-level graphical language. Model transformers and a code generation backend generate an implementation for the target language and framework. Our development tools have been designed for use in education and research. Current MDA & UML tools are very complex. Thus, they are not suitable for teaching computer science basics in high schools and undergraduate courses. In contrast, VRDK allows students to get a robot control application up and running in a few minutes. VRDK can execute the model directly from the model editor. This allows for easy testing and rapid prototyping. Using model transformation and code generation, students can extend their application using Visual Studio.NET and their choice of .NET language.

Ralf Westpha

Biography: Ralf Westphal (www.ralfw.de) is a freelance author and consultant on component oriented development using Microsoft technologies, one of Microsoft's independent Regional Directors for Germany, a frequent speaker at developer conferences like Microsoft DevDays, CMP Software Development, SIGS XML One, or Comdex, and one of the .NET Twins (www.dotnettwins.de). From 1998 until 2001 he was editor-in-chief of Germany's largest software developer magazine, BasicPro for Visual Basic programmers.

Abstract: No Slides, Just Code: Developing a Napster Clone The .NET Framework comes with a comprehensive class library and - in conjunction with VS.NET - boasts to be one of the most productive application development environments. This talk will try to convey a feeling for this type of productivity as well as demonstrate the integration of a number of network communication technologies. Instead of showing dry slides and a couple of code samples the presentation will develop a Napster like file exchange application with client and server from the ground up. Attendees will not only see how to employ certain facets of the .NET Framework, but also how to use VS.NET, and architect a solution.

Sample code from CopyCat session on 22 April 2004
Developing a Napster clone