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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dropped by Erik Meijer's world and got a look at what he and team have been and still are working on (thus there is no out-of-date property of this fun and insightful interview that is off-the-cuff as it gets: deep Channel 9 ).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!

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:

Verification of algorithm-intensive systems is a long, costly process. Studies show that the majority of flaws in embedded systems are introduced at the specification stage, but are not detected until late in the development process. These flaws are the dominant cause of project delays and a major contributor to engineering costs. For algorithm-intensive systems —including systems with communications, audio, video, imaging, and navigation functions— these delays and costs are exploding as system complexity increases. It doesn't have to be this way. Many designers of algorithm-intensive systems already have the tools they need to get verification under control. Engineers can use these same tools to build system models that help them find and correct problems earlier in the development process. This can not only reduce verification time, but also improves the performance of their designs. In this article, we'll explain three practical approaches to early verification that make this possible. First, let's examine why the current algorithm verification process is inefficient and error-prone. In a typical workflow, designs start with algorithm developers, who pass the design to hardware and software teams using specification documents.

For my latest project, WeatherBar, I had to pick a weather API. Basically, I needed to get the weather conditions for a specific location, as well as a short forecast. The choices I had were Yahoo Weather API, WeatherBug API and Google Weather API (yes,there is no mistake here – it is a direct API call, since Google doesn’t have an official page for this API). Probably there are more services offering a public weather API out there, but these caught my attention.

The first textbook of its kind, Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach launches today, authored by Dr. David B. Kirk, NVIDIA Fellow and former chief scientist, and Dr. Wen-mei Hwu, who serves at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, co-director of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center and principal investigator of the CUDA Center of Excellence. The textbook, which is 256 pages, is the first aimed at teaching advanced students and professionals the basic concepts of parallel programming and GPU architectures. Published by Morgan Kaufmann, it explores various techniques for constructing parallel programs and reviews numerous case studies. With conventional CPU-based computing no longer scaling in performance and the world’s computational challenges increasing in complexity, the need for massively parallel processing has never been greater. GPUs have hundreds of cores capable of delivering transformative performance increases across a wide range of computational challenges. The rise of these multi-core architectures has raised the need to teach advanced programmers a new and essential skill: how to program massively parallel processors.

From Nic:   We're piloting a new show idea on Wednesday called Help Desk where we put together a group of Windows trouble shooting gurus and get them to answer your Windows PC issues live on the air...   Any Niners out there have Windows PC issues/questions they need some help with?   Send to ch9live(AT)microsoft(DOT)com or tweet us @ch9live and make sure to watch the show live or check out the broadcast afterwards on demand.

In case you haven’t realized it, the new trend in computer chip technology is multi-core. This is where most of the speed improvements moving forward will come from on our computers. To take full advantage of this however it is necessary to design your applications using Parallel Programming practices, also known as "parallelism". In today’s episode, we will meet with Stephen Toub, who will share with us some of the overarching concepts associated with parallelism, and some of the ways we are trying to empower developers to develop applications to take advantage of it.

Welcome to the first episode of Cloud Cover!  Join Ryan and Steve as they cover the Windows Azure platform, digging into features, discussing the latest news and announcements, and sharing tips and tricks. Follow and interact with us at @cloudcovershow In this episode: Learn about the Service Management API and how to use PowerShell cmdlets to manage your cloud services. Find out how to get started quickly on the Windows Azure platform. Other topics include: SQL Azure updates! Windows Azure Drives (XDrive).  Hear about some cool new Windows Azure storage management tools. Azure Reader architecture.

Orchard will create shared components for building ASP.NET applications and extensions, and specific applications that leverage these components to meet the needs of end-users, scripters, and developers. Additionally, we seek to create partnerships with existing application authors to help them achieve their goals. Orchard is delivered as part of the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery under the CodePlex Foundation. It is licensed under a New BSD license, which is approved by the OSI. The intended output of the Orchard project is three-fold: Individual .NET-based applications that appeal to end-users , scripters, and developers A set of re-usable components that makes it easy to build such applications A vibrant community to help define these applications and extensions In the near term, the Orchard project is focused on delivering a .NET-based CMS application that will allow users to rapidly create content-driven Websites, and an extensibility framework that will allow developers and customizers to provide additional functionality through extensions and themes. Erik Porter and Nathan Heskew are two of the developers of Orchard. Do they look familiar? Sure they do. They used to be devs on the C9 team.

Asynchronous work flows are a very powerful tool in programming. They allow your threads to do other work while you wait for results from a long running piece of work. How would you write an asynchronous work flow in C#? Logically you might consider chaining together callbacks.

Dr. Cormac Herley spends most of his time thinking about why and how computer users reject security advice (originating from both fellow humans and software security warning prompts). Recently, his paper So Long, and No Thanks for the Externalities: the Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users, received a fair amount of attention from the general media (Boston Globe, Tech Republic, NPR, etc). The paper also prompted our favorite software renegade, Dr. Erik Meijer, to send me an email simply asking "please set up and E2E with Cormac Herley". I did just that and the following conversation is what happened...

The VMKit project is an implementation of a JVM and CLI virtual machine (.Net is an implementation of the CLI). It translates Java bytecode and MSIL in the LLVM IR and uses the LLVM framework for optimizations and compilation. For garbage collection, it uses MMTk. You can get and build the source today.

Ralph Johnson presents a pattern language that he and his colleagues are working on in an attempt to solve the hard issues of parallel programming through a set of design patterns: Structural Patterns, Computational Patterns, Parallel Algorithm Strategy Patterns, Implementation Strategy Patterns, and Concurrent Execution Patterns.

Today sees the launch of Visual Studio 2010, at five launch events around the world, as announced by Bob Muglia, Jason Zander and S. Somasegar, and presented live today in Las Vegas.   Visual Studio 2010 includes the official version 2.0 of the F# language. As is our custom on the F# team, we also release a matching MSI and ZIP of F# 2.0 (for use with Visual Studio 2008 and as a standalone compiler on a range of platforms)   Today represents the culmination of 7 years of work on the language at Microsoft Research, and, more recently, the Microsoft Developer Division. I am immensely proud of what we’ve achieved. F# brings a productive functional and object-oriented programming language to .NET, extending the platform to new audiences in technical, algorithmic, data-rich, parallel and explorative domains, and its inclusion in Visual Studio 2010 represents a huge milestone for the language.   To help understand what we’re doing with F#, I’ve listed some of the common questions people have about the language below.  We thank everyone who has been involved in the production of F#, especially the many users who have given us feedback on the language!