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With the consumer demand for richer content and its resultant , increasing high data bandwidth continuing to drive communications systems, coding for error control has become extraordinarily important. One way to improve the bit error rate (BER), while maintaining high data reliability, is to use an error correction technique like the Viterbi algorithm. Originally conceived by Andrew Viterbi as an error-correction scheme for noisy digital communication, the Viterbi algorithm provides an efficient method for forward error correction (FEC) that improves channel reliability. Today, it is used in many digital communications systems in applications as diverse as CDMA and GSM digital cellular, dial-up modems, satellite, deep-space communications and 802.11 wireless LANs. It is also commonly used in speech recognition, keyword spotting and computational linguistics.

Continuing to work on a humanoid helper robot called ARMAR, the Collaborative Research Center 588: Humanoid Robots at the University of Karlsruhe began planning ARMAR-IIIa (blue) in 2006. It has 43 degrees of freedom (torso x3, 2 arms x7, 2 hands x8, head x7) and is equipped with position, velocity, and force sensors.  The upper-body has a modular design based on the average dimensions of a person, with 14 tactile sensors per hand.  Like the previous versions, it moves on a mobile platform.  In 2008 they built a slightly upgraded version of the robot called ARMAR-IIIb (red).  Both robots use the Karlsruhe Humanoid Head, which has 2 cameras per eye (for near and far vision).  The head has a total of 7 degrees of freedom (neck x4, eyes x3), 6 microphones, and a 6D inertial sensor.

Microsoft Technical Fellow and C# creator Anders Hejlsberg explains the new C# and VB.NET asynchronous programming model, available as Async CTP now, which makes async programming much easier for .NET developers.

One of the common discussions that I've had with several colleagues when we're making use of some of the higher order functions that can be applied on collections is whether to use the LINQ style syntax or to chain the different methods together. I tend to prefer the latter approach although when asked the question after my talk at Developer Developer Developer I didn't really have a good answer other than to suggest that it seemed to just be a personal preference thing. Damian Marshall suggested that he preferred the method chaining approach because it more clearly describes the idea of passing a collection through a pipeline where we can apply different operations to that collection.

In this interview made by InfoQ’s Sadek Drobi, Don Syme, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, answers questions mostly on F#, but also on functional programming, C# generics, type classes in Haskell, similarities between F# and Scala.

Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel. View the demos and sample applications to see a few of the visualizations that flare makes it easy to build. To begin making your own visualizations, download flare and work through the tutorial. You should also get familiar with the API documentation. Need more help? Visit the help forum (you'll need a SourceForge login to post). Flare is open-source software released under a BSD license, meaning it can be freely deployed and modified (and even sold for $$). Flare's design was adapted from its predecessor prefuse, a visualization toolkit for Java

The Control Gallery is a directory of over 900 controls and components to use in your own applications. You will find everything from simple controls to full e-commerce components.

We describe a practical method for reasoning about realistic concurrent programs. Our method allows global two-state invariants that restrict update of shared state. We provide simple, sufficient conditions for checking those global invariants modularly. The method has been implemented in VCC, an automatic, sound, modular verifier for concurrent C programs. VCC has been used to verify functional correctness of tens of thousands of lines of Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization platform and of SYSGO's embedded real-time operating system PikeOS.

Brjann Brekkan, PM for the Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution and related products, describes the capabilities and business drivers behind the solution. Beginning at [6:08], he gives us a screencast demo of parts of the solution. The demo includes automated AD group management and access through Forefront Identity Manager (FIM), FIM password reset, and managing group membership via Outlook. Learn more about the IAM solution

When Sven Groot was in town a while ago we dropped by Erik Meijer's world and got a look at what he and team have been and still are working on (thus there is no out-of-date property of this fun and insightful interview that is off-the-cuff as it gets: deep Channel 9 ). It's great that we were able to put a real live Niner into fire in one of Erik's team meetings. There is a great deal to learn here. Thank you, Sven, for being a real sport! Great stuff in here. Tune in!

PC-compatible industrial computers are increasing in computing power at a rapid rate due to the availability of multi-core microprocessor chips, and Microsoft Windows has become the de-facto software platform for implementing human-machine interfaces (HMIs). PCs are also becoming more reliable. With these trends, the practice of building robotic systems as complex multi-architecture, multi-platform systems is being challenged. It is now becoming possible to integrate all the functions of machine control and HMI into a single platform, without sacrificing performance and reliability of processing. Through new developments in software, we are seeing industrial systems evolving to better integrate Windows with real-time functionality such as machine vision and motion control. Software support to simplify motion control algorithm implementation already exists for the Intel processor architecture.

TenAsys Corporation, a provider of real-time OS and virtualization software, has announced that all of its embedded virtualization software products, including the INtime real-time OS for Windows, provide full support for new 2010 Intel Core processors and companion chipsets for the embedded market.

OpenGL 3.1 introduced two new sources from where shaders can retrieve their data, namely uniform buffers and texture buffers. These can be used to accelerate rendering when heavy usage of application provided data happens like in case of skeletal animation, especially when combined with geometry instancing. However, even if the functionality is in the core specification for about a year now, there are few demos out there to show their usage, as so, there is a big confusion around when to use them and which one is more suitable for a particular use case. Both AMD and NVIDIA have updated their GPU programming guides to present the latest facilities provided by both OpenGL and DirectX, however I still see that people don’t really understand how they work and that prevents them from effectively taking advantage of these features. Once, at some online forum, I found somebody arguing why is this whole confusion introduced by the Khronos Group and why there is no general buffer type to use instead and the decision whether to use uniform or texture buffers should be a decision made by the driver. This particular post motivated me to write this article.

F# is Microsoft's first functional programming language to be included as one of Visual Studio's official set of languages. F# is a succinct, efficient, expressive functional/object-oriented programming language under joint development by Microsoft Developer Division and Microsoft Research. During the course of Erik Meijer's fantastic lecture series on functional programming fundamentals several of you asked for examples of specific topics in F#. Well, we listened. Dr. Don Syme is a principal researcher in MSR Cambridge. He has a rich history in programming language research, design, and implementation (C# generics being one of his most recognized implementations), and is the principle creator of F#. Who better to lecture on the topic than Don? This three part series will serve as an introduction to F#, including insights into the rationale behind the history and creation of Microsoft's newest language.

Jeffrey Richter has completed CLR via C#, Third Edition and the book is at the printer! We’ll post chapter excerpts when the book is available in a couple of weeks. Here is Jeffrey describing the book in his Introduction: