Behind The Code (Audio) - Channel 9

It seems as though all of us are actively trying to cram more and more features, functionality, and speed out of everything we use. While the world seems faster paced today than it ever has been in the past, the quest for performance and efficiency is as old as recorded history, and almost certainly beyond. Getting more done, in less time has always been a component driving human ingenuity.  Today's guest doesn't just understand how to improve system performance, he and his teams have revolutionized the tools and methodologies we use to do it.Michael Fortin began his Career at Microsoft in 1997, where he worked on Windows 2000 doing development on tools to aid in improving system and application performance. Later, as a performance analyst, he took a more active role in overall systems performance and fundamentals.Robert Hess moderates this edition of Behind the Code.  

At the heart of every computer, every operating system, every problem, is an engineer.  An engineer may not live the glorious rock-star life of your favorite musician, but it is through their efforts that the complex systems, that are more and more significant in our lives, are able to work.   Often these engineers, as important as their roles might be in the systems that they oversee, will describe themselves as "just an engineer".  Perhaps that's sort of like Clark Kent describing himself as "just a reporter".  Today's guest might try to describe himself as "just an engineer at heart", but we'll see that he is a lot more than that.  Henry Sanders got his start at Microsoft in 1988, working on OS/2 and later Windows NT, which was a key turning point in Microsoft's history and its evolution of Windows.  Core infrastructure, and often the networking stacks, is what Henry focused on. Today he heads up the development team for Windows Phone and applies the same drive toward providing solidly built systems to this new and exciting platform that continues to illustrate the evolution of Windows and the applications that run on them.  Robert Hess moderates this edition of Behind the Code.

At a certain level, computers are all about giving computational power and resources to the common man.  Even though many of you may not remember it, it wasn't that long ago when computers were tools which could only be afforded by the very largest of companies. Today however; computers are a common fixture of our everyday lives.  We can look toward companies like Apple, IBM and Microsoft as well as Cisco, Sun, Novell, and countless others as being the driving forces behind making computers small, powerful and, more importantly, cheap enough to work their way into common usage.  Power to and for the people. However, when you look at the big computing companies and the executives who drive their success, it may be hard to feel a connection, a familiarity, or a friend in those faces. They are big individuals, making big decisions, and driving big industry in ways that are hard for you to relate to.  Then there are some computing executives who break that mold, and feel like us. You can see in their faces their roots as an ordinary person, as a common man.  Here at Microsoft, one of those executives is Scott Guthrie. In the last 15 years at Microsoft Scott Guthrie has been a constant force in the ever-evolving .NET Platform.  After starting out in the Internet Information Server group in 1997, he soon began the initial work on what would eventually turn into ASP.NET, and one of the core pillars of the overall .NET Framework.  Scott has since become a fixture, if not a figurehead, of .NET development worldwide. His straightforward nature, and ability to still spend time deep in code, reminds developers that he is one of us.  When we see Scott on a stage showing an audience upcoming features of a technology he is working on, we see ourselves, we see our future. The great Robert Hess moderates this edition of Behind the Code.

When thinking about businesses, large or small, it can be easy to lose sight of the individual. For the individuals within those companies, it can be difficult to see the role they play in the big picture and how their personal journey might fit in. For individuals outside those companies, also known as customers, it may feel like their needs are all but invisible.  However, when the importance of an individual is embraced, that is when a company discovers its soul.  And when the role of an individual within a corporation revolves around the needs of the individuals outside of it, that's when true magic happens. At Microsoft, one of those individuals is Charlie Kindel, GM of the Developer Ecosystem for Windows Phone division. With a career that has spanned over twenty years at Microsoft, Charlie has been a long-time advocate for the needs of the customer.  He started by helping third party developers build great applications on our platforms, followed by adding advanced technologies into Windows that would allow applications to better interoperate with one another.  Charlie then focused on improving the home experience by founding the eHome group, shipping Windows Media Center, and later being the driving force behind Windows Home Server.  It was through this journey that Charlie found the value and importance of the individual, regardless of their role or their needs. And it is precisely because of his experience with both developers and consumers that Charlie now heads up the applications platform team for Windows Phone 7, giving him the opportunity to truly make a difference, and mostly likely making a difference in how customers use their phone.Robert Hess moderates this edition of Behind The Code.  Enjoy!

From something as simple as a paperclip to far more complex machines such as computers, there are a wide variety of machines forming a regular part of our daily lives. None, however, come close to the complexity found in the machine that is the human being.When you think of Microsoft, you might simply consider the various ways the company focuses on technologies related to computers. But Microsoft also plays a role in the human equation, and not just in trying to design better user interfaces and ergonomic hardware. Structural models and data filtering algorithms can also find application at a biological level, assisting us in better understanding our own selves, as well as the diseases which often impact us.To this end, David Heckerman, Distinguished Scientist in the eScience group, is one person at Microsoft working to find new ways to apply advanced technological algorithms to our own biology. David began his education with the intent of becoming a physicist, but his interests eventually led him into the medical sciences. While working on his MD at Stanford, he began looking at the problems of Artificial Intelligence. For his PhD work, he submitted an impressive construct he called the “probabilistic expert system." In fact, it was so impressive that in 1992 Microsoft hired him to build such systems for non-medical applications. David's work at Microsoft began to lead him further and further from his original medical focus. One of his pioneering areas of study was for graphical models known as Bayesian networks, and it was while working on these models that he recognized how they could be applied to medicine and biology. Today, his efforts have allowed him to return to his medical education roots, and he is working both to design such things as a vaccine for HIV and search for genetic causes of disease.

Over thousands of years, language has evolved in order to provide mankind a mechanism for making it easier to communicate with one another. Today, the world is filled with a wide variety of languages, some of which are radically different from one another, while others bear striking similarities. In addition to improving interpersonal communications, however, languages have evolved to facilitate the transfer of information, instructions, and intent between people and machines. Understanding, designing, and evangelizing many of these languages, and democratizing the programming methodologies within them, is Erik Meijer. Erik is a legendary figure in the programming language design community and one of Niner Nation's favorite personalities. Today, tune in and meet the man behind the code; some of Erik's fascinating personal and professional histories may well surprise you. The great Robert Hess moderates this latest edition of Behind the Code.Enjoy.PS: Erik will be speaking at MIX10!

Nick Baker is General Manager for Xbox Architectural Design. After graduating from Imperial College London in 1990, he found his way to Apple and worked on the team that tried to create a specialized video card. He then went to 3DO where he worked on their high-end gaming system, which unfortunately failed in the market. In 1997 he joined Microsoft to work in the WebTV team on their next generation set-top-box known as UltimateTV. It was during this time that Microsoft’s Xbox was entering its initial design phase, and because Nick and his team had already done some research at adding game-play capabilities to UltimateTV they provided some useful guidance on the first Xbox hardware design. Nick’s assistance with the initial Xbox design was seen as pivotal enough, that in 2002 he was asked to head up the team that would design the next generation hardware, which would eventually become known as the XBOX 360. It is there, that Nick Baker finds himself to this day, working hard at fine tuning the design of the system, its costs, and its performance.

Microsoft is well known for Windows, Office, .NET, Xbox, Zune and a long list of other products and technologies.   Less discussed however, is a group at Microsoft that isn’t necessarily focused on ship dates, packaging, or competing products. Instead they think about how computers and technology can make life easier, with an eye towards developing new technologies that can improve all our lives and often in cooperation with product team, but also working with people in academia, governments and industry. The name of this group is Microsoft Research.   Eric Horvitz, today’s guest, joined Microsoft Research with two colleagues in 1993 to form the Decision Theory and Adaptive Systems group. Since then he has been at the center of a variety of projects focused on machine intelligence and adaptation, and the related tasks of information discovery, collection, and delivery

Artists embody a diverse set of talents and interests. This gives them a rich array of experiences to draw upon in their work. In the same way, Richard Ward brings an eclectic background and collection of interests to his efforts at Microsoft.  He brings this diversity to his own art of programming within the Windows Core Architecture team.   While most Windows developers are focusing on the next version of Windows, Richard and his team are already hard at work on the version which will follow. In this episode of Behind The Code, we will discover what experiences Richard finds most helpful, as he focuses on building out the core infrastructure components of what will, one day, be running on the vast majority of the world’s computers. Read Richard Ward’s { End Bracket } column in MSDN Magazine.

In the often male dominated world of computers, Rebecca Norlander has made a name for herself by taking on big challenges, and proving she has what it takes to deliver results.  Join us to learn how Rebecca got her start at Microsoft, advancing through roles where she had tremendous impact on Excel, Internet Explorer, Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista Security, and now as Technical Strategist to Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie.   Rebecca will share with us her insights around the obstacles she has overcome, the lessons she has learned, and how she became a strong advocate for customers while working on a variety of high profile projects. 

It is hard to imagine a time when the internet wasn’t a part of our lives.  It has been over a decade since the Web transformed the Internet from an academic exercise into a common household name. Terry Crowley may today be hard at work focusing on the advanced features and capabilities which will be part of Office 14, but he was also deeply involved with the early history and evolution of the early Internet.  Join us as he shares with us his reflections of the Internet, the origins and evolution of FrontPage, experiences in Office, and his expectations for where this technology is leading us. The venerable Robert Hess conducts this interview. Low res file. Zune file. MP4 file. Read Terry Crowley’s { End Bracket } column in MSDN Magazine

Where do objects go when they aren't used anymore (and how to know that they are no longer useful to the executing code that created them)? Might seem like a silly question to most developers, but that's what Technical Fellow Patrick Dussud has been dealing with for most of his career. His special area of focus is implementing garbage collection (GC) in various programming languages and systems (from JScript to the CLR). In this episode, we discuss with Patrick how GC concepts and implementations have evolved over the years, how the GC in the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) might be different from others, and how GC improvements in the future may need to change to deal with advancements in both software and hardware systems. Patrick also has some interesting things to say about clowns. This episode of Behind the Code is hosted by Robert Hess, Director in the Developer and Platform Evangelism Group. Although new to hosting Behind the Code, Robert is no stranger to hosting technical shows. For more than seven years, he hosted The .NET Show, a popular on-demand webcast that focused on providing architectural and programming information to developers around the world. Low res download file for bandwidth challenged.

A rolling stone gathers no moss. What it does gather, however, is a great deal of experience. During his long career at Microsoft, Mohsen Agsen has been actively avoiding gathering moss. LAN Manager, MCS, bCentral, Exchange, Visual Studio and … oh yes … games too. These are just a few of the products and technologies that Mohsen has been involved in.  At each step along the way, he's built and maintained a reputation for being a strategic thinker and technical leader. During this episode, we discuss with Mohsen some of the challenges that Microsoft has faced in the past, and learn how not just Microsoft, but the industry in general can deal with the challenges of today.

What do global warming, a scientific instrument weighing about 4500 tons and bill collection have in common? The once Berkeley ‘hippie chick’ turned Software Architect Catharine van Ingen. Catharine has a wealth of experience in hardware, including work with the Alpha machine and MIPS processor teams, industrial-strength software for algorithms used to manage water flows, logging data from particle accelerator detectors, and buying Mickey Mouse watches over the Internet.

For eighteen years at Microsoft, Rico Mariani’s contagious enthusiasm for technology has inspired countless others to write better and faster code. Most people inside Microsoft know this software architect from his frequent postings on the internal performance tuning alias, and other people know him by reading his blog on MSDN. He often says that being an architect is a teaching gig and his passion for sharing knowledge has established him as an industry expert. Additionally, what you might not know is Rico is responsible for many of the cool features and tools that make programming easier like value tips. See more Rico on C9 here.

Rob Short is an operating system pioneer. He helped Microsoft transition from the 1980s with DOS and 16 bit windows into the 32 bit world with Windows NT in the 1990s. More recently, Rob was part of the team that further enhanced windows to take advantage of the 64 bit processors of the new millennium. Today he is the Vice President overseeing development of windows kernel and virtualization technologies. You can see more Rob here and meet some of the "core" architects he mentions in the video.

This is Behind the Code’s pilot episode with Core File Services architect, Mark Zbikowski. Mark began his career at Microsoft in 1981, working on DOS 1.0 as a designer, coder and liaison with IBM. His quarter century long career has included significant involvement in OS/2, Cairo’s Object File System (OFS), and the NT File System (NTFS). In addition, he has been a key player in all of Microsoft’s File System work. Former Microsoft software architect Pat Helland interviews Mark about the early days at Microsoft, his passion for product development and the challenges of producing software.