Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Dev Center, App

Featured Project: Family.Show on Codeplex

jcannon — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:09:00 GMT

Over the course of the past year, we've highlighted various community and open source projects on Codeplex. This morning, I wanted to do the same with a very cool open source project that I came across over the weekend called Family.Show. Family.Show is a genealogy project that visualizes family mapping and relationships. The project was released in July 2007 and it's currently at version 2. While the project is backed by Vertigo Software, it is Open Source and licensed under the Microsoft Public License.

Here's a small screen grab from the project home page:

Over the weekend, I used some free time & a family BBQ to start building my own family tree. Frankly, while I'm impressed with the application and it's ease-of-use, I was more amazed at the interest and enjoyment everyone in my family experienced using it. Everybody from my 83 year old grandmother to my 19 year old sister were excited to explore and add to the family tree. It gives new meaning to the collaborative potential of open source :>

See above, the Cannon family tree (yikes) - but infinitely fascinating to self-described family historians. It's worth noting that Family.Show also supports the import/export of GEDCOM standard files, so your work can interchange with other genealogy software packages as well.

I encourage anyone interested to download & tinker with it. Additionally, here are some additional resources:

Visit the Codeplex project home page
Family.Show at MIX07
Watch a Channel9 Video with the core development team

-Jamie

Code Parallel or Die, Part 2

Frank Chism — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:40:00 GMT

It’s multicore time. Do you know where your parallelism is?
Do you know where your parallelism is? Well you better find it! This is because you must or your users will not see the doubling of performance that they have seen for the last seven or eight generations of microprocessors. Why? Well the chip makers ran out of physics, clocks just couldn’t go a lot faster every few months the way they used to and more cores, even if they double or triple the performance of the processor do not lead to a faster feeling system if all the applications are serial. So, is your application serial? It better not be.

Two examples from my own life demonstrate the user and buyer frustration we are about to hit head on. First my sister, a long time Mac user, bought a new dual socket dual core Mac. On paper this system was easily three to five times “more powerful” then her previous system, a dual processor Mac. Her first complaint was, “It doesn’t feel faster. It certainly doesn’t feel ‘wicked fast’ compared to my five year old system.” I pointed out to her that what she had was more power, not more ‘faster’. I told her to try doing more than one thing at once. It took awhile for her to get the hang of this, but one day recently she called and started raving about how ‘powerful’ her new system was compared to her old one. What she had learned how to do was to get three or four long running tasks to run in the background while continuing to do her interactive day to day tasks without any noticeable degradation in interactive performance!

As a second example, for Christmas I built my wife a new dual core system because she was complaining about her system being too slow and crashing all the time. It was a thing of beauty with twice the CPU, twice the memory, and five times the capacity and twice the bandwidth of her old disks. The processor was two generations newer with a 20% faster clock and over four times the memory bandwidth. I was ready for a big hug and profuse thanks for my intelligence and craftsmanship. Boy was I in for a disappointment. What I got was, “It isn’t any faster.” I am a victim of the core war!

The lights are on, but there’s no parallel home.
Well my personal tragedy was nothing compared to what will happen to any software developer or corporation that depends on their fortune or fame to flow from people using their product and liking the experience. That is, it will be tragic for those who do not start to think parallel for every step of every phase of every program that they write and design in parallel not try to graft it in afterwards. Just as with security, and network awareness, you don’t get good results trying to add in parallel later. You must start in parallel and continue in parallel and only go serial as a last drastic measure and then only for the shortest possible time. Sadly, even in my own backyard of High Performance Computing the number of programs that have tried to graft in parallel rather than design it in is appalling. What they end up with is often what I call the ‘Silence of the Lames’. That is, a lame parallel port that doesn’t scale or doesn’t speed up their program nearly as much as is possible.

Now you might say that this only works for scientific programs with massive amounts of data. Well, sorry Charlie, if your product is something as ‘serial’ as a document processing program like Microsoft Word, you had better be thinking how you can use those extra cores to improve the user experience. Why? Well as I said in the beginning: Code parallel or die!

For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for the want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for the want of care about a horseshoe nail. - Benjamin Franklin

That’s all for now. I enjoyed writing this and hope to hear from some of you about what you think of my ‘Parallel Imperative’ and what you can personally do about it.
So, never stop studying and I’ll blog at you later.

- Frank

Supernova

Sam Ramji — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:22:00 GMT

I’m writing this from EclipseCon in Santa Clara, California, where I’m going to announce the beginning of Microsoft’s collaborative work with the Eclipse Foundation.

This started about a year ago when I met Mike Milinkovich at an open source event (the Open Source Software Think Tank 2007) where we were seated at the same table, and assigned to discuss “key issues inhibiting the growth of open source”. We found we had pretty similar ways of looking at problems – I found Mike to be very pragmatic and straightforward in his thinking. That discussion led to a conversation about what we could do to help Eclipse developers building software for Windows.

At the same time, the CardSpace team at Microsoft was already working actively with the Higgins Project to establish a secure, interoperable framework for user identity on the web – an architecture known as the Identity Metasystem. Since the inception of Higgins, the CardSpace team has worked very closely with the Higgins team, providing them the protocol documentation they needed to be able to build an identity selector that is interoperable with CardSpace, as well as placing those protocol specifications under the OSP so that they knew that it was safe to do so. We share a commitment to building a user-centric, privacy-preserving, secure, easy-to-use identity layer for the Internet.

Currently, Higgins, Microsoft, and dozens of other companies and projects are in the midst of the third OSIS-sponsored user-centric identity interop, where we all try our code together, providing the data needed to improve both our implementations and the interoperability between them.

Among a range of other opportunities (which we’re still working on), we discovered that Steve Northover (the SWT team lead) had gotten requests to make it easy for Java developers to write applications that look and feel like native Windows Vista. He and a small group of developers built out a prototype that enables SWT to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). We’re committing to improve this technology with direct support from our engineering teams and the Open Source Software Lab, with the goal of a first-class authoring experience for Java developers.

This is exciting to me – as a Java developer in my prior life (as well as the first technical marketing manager for BEA’s WebLogic Workshop, now Apache Beehive) it just makes sense to enable Java on Windows. We started a collaborative effort with JBoss two years ago that continues to this day. At the end of the day, it’s all about the developer. There will be more to come from the conversations that Eclipse and Microsoft have begun, and I look forward to announcing those in the future as we have demonstrable technology results.

Cheers,
Sam

Eclipse Executive Director, Mike Milinkovich, Talks with Sam

Sam Ramji — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 18:21:00 GMT

Mike Milinkovich is the Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation - an open source community - supported by a non-profit foundation - dedicated to building an open source development environment. In this podcast, Mike joins us to discuss some history around Eclipse, the larger open source community - and his varied background in accounting and computer science. Mike also touches on the architecture of participation's impact on the foundation and the development team behind the Eclipse platform.

For interested Eclipse users, Sam will be speaking at this year's EclipseCon 2008 - stay tuned to Port 25 for more information as that draws closer.

Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries

jcannon — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:47:00 GMT

Some news from Scott Guthrie's blog this morning - we'll get more from the .NET and Shared Source team over the next few months:

"One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them.

Today I'm excited to announce that we'll be providing this with the .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 release later this year.

We'll begin by offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows). We'll then be adding more libraries in the months ahead (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ). The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).

You'll be able to download the .NET Framework source libraries via a standalone install (allowing you to use any text editor to browse it locally). We will also provide integrated debugging support of it within VS 2008.

Integrated Visual Studio 2008 Debugging Support

The final release of VS 2008 will support the ability to configure the debugger to dynamically download the .NET Framework debugger symbols (and corresponding source code) from a web server hosted by Microsoft. You'll be able to configure the .NET Framework symbols to be downloaded all in one shot, or manually retrieved on demand:

Read the rest of the post at Scott Guthrie's Blog....

Python, Java, Ruby, Oh My! Silverlight Alpha 1.1 ships with Dynamic Language Support

MichaelF — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:45:00 GMT

Mix 07 kicked off today with keynotes from Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie. Amongst announcements regarding media and Silverlight Scott Guthrie announced the release of a cross-platform version of the .NET framework within Silverlight Alpha 1.1. Included is a Dynamic Language Runtime that allows developers to use languages such as Python, Java and Ruby to program in Silverlight.

I could drone on about this but we decided to go sit down with two of the individuals who contributed to this effort: Jim Hugunin and John Lam instead. Jim, who we interviewed before, gives us some insight into this announcement including some information about new MS-PL releases to Codeplex tied to this announcement (Hint: IronPython 2.0).

Later today, we will post the second interview with John Lam.

Video: Python, Java, Ruby, Oh My! Silverlight Alpha 1.1 ships with Dynamic Language Sup

Taking the Heavy Lifting out of Game Development

MichaelF — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 23:21:00 GMT

In this interview Sam sits down with a veteran of the gaming industry, Star Trek Deck Plan Expert and Development Manager for the XNA Community Game Platform: Frank Savage. Sam and Frank discuss his background and how he ended up at Microsoft as well as the finer points of XNA. Included are demos of both games that have been developed using XNA as well as how XNA eases much of the work associated with game development allowing users to focus on the game itself.

Video: Taking the Heavy Lifting out of Game Development

You can download XNA Express Studio and the XNA Framework here.

Connecting Office Applications to MySQL and PostgreSQL via ODBC

MichaelF — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 18:05:00 GMT

In cases where business applications have been built on open source databases, it may be necessary to connect other Windows applications, such as Microsoft Access or Excel, to these databases for reporting or business intelligence purposes.

One potential application of this process is to use Excel as a front-end for data analysis. Data can be pulled from views or tables and then further analyzed, graphed, and the like. Even pivot tables can be used to create even more powerful reporting solutions.

This how-to walks through this process using Excel as an example application. Although in this example, the MySQL and PostgreSQL servers are running on Linux, the steps are no different if the software is running on Windows. These steps are:

1.         Setting up authentication
2.         Installing the ODBC Drivers
3.         Configuring the data source
4.         Importing the data.

MySQL on Windows: Configuration & Install

jcannon — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 19:02:00 GMT

This week, the lab looks at configuring and installing MySQL - an open source relational database management system which is typically used for web applications.

This paper will provide an overview of configuring & installing this software on Windows. MySQL does not have as many features as PostgreSQL, however, and one would expect it to perform substantially better than PostgreSQL on Windows because of its thread-based architecture (PostgreSQL uses a process-based architecture instead).

Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.

PostgreSQL on Windows: A Primer

MichaelF — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:06:00 GMT

This paper will cover the installation and initial configuration of PostgreSQL 8.2 on Windows up to a point where a database is created and plpgsql is installed in it. We assume an ability to walk through the install wizard in general, though screens that do require additional information will be covered (with screenshots). Important options in the postgresql.conf and pg_hba.conf will be covered, as will database creation in PgAdmin III.

Developer Resources for Open Source Software on Vista

MichaelF — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 14:10:00 GMT

Recently we posted about http://www.devreadiness.com, an online resource for Vista Application Compatibility questions/guidance. After posting we received some feedback that with some changes they could become much more useful for Open Source Developers. Based on this feedback we are going to create a set of resources specifically tailored for the open source developer/ISV.

This is where we would like some help. We can move forward with this based on our understanding and assumptions or we can involve our community and ensure that the “right” changes are being made. To this end we are seeking a small group of volunteers who would be willing to act as a review/guidance team. This endeavor should not be tremendously time consuming. We anticipate a single review/feedback cycle of existing content to get us started. After an initial pass we will request one to two more review cycles to ensure we are on the right path.

While the time required is not tremendous, the impact of your participation will be. Please drop a line to port25@microsoft.com if you are interested.

Thanks!

Sam

Java and .NET Interoperability: JNBridge

MichaelF — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 20:57:00 GMT

Update: We thought we would try our videos on YouTube...would love to hear feedback on this implementation.
Sam interviews Wayne Citrin to discuss work his company, JNBridge, has done to provide interoperability between .NET and Java.

Wayne Citrin is the CTO at JNBridge. He is the architect of JNBridgePro, and has been engrossed in Java and .NET interop issues since .NET's beta days. Previously, Wayne was a leading researcher in programming languages and compilers, and was on the Computer Engineering faculty at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He was a researcher at IBM's research lab in Zürich, Switzerland, and has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in Computer Science.

The JNBridge blog can be found here.

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Open Source Applications on Windows Vista: Readiness Kit

MichaelF — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 02:19:00 GMT

http://www.devreadiness.org

· Guidance

· Technical Whitepapers

· Tools

· Demos

http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/reference/appcompat/default.aspx

· Thirty minute compatibility check

· Extended feature details

· Integration guidance

http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/reference

· Application compatibility

· Communications

· Interoperability and Migration

· Mobile PC

· Presentation

· Security

· System Services

Recently Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner suggested we provide: "Something like a checklist of the most common OS integration points that have changed from Windows XP would be extremely useful…"

Turns out there are some useful resources already available, see above, for those interested in developing Open Source applications for Windows Vista or ensuring that their current applications are compatible.

I took a few minutes to speak with Michael Shaw, Technical Evangelist, to get some additional details on the resources available at the sites listed above. The following is a short synopsis of our conversation.

What is http://www.devreadiness.org?

MShaw: The site is an aggregation of tools, whitepapers, presentations and videos intended to help developers understand how to make their existing Windows XP applications compatible with Windows Vista.

Are there other sites aside from devreadiness that developers can turn to?

MShaw: Yes, but many of the resources available on those sites are either linked from devreadiness or the tools/resources are also located on our site. Consider this a one-stop shop for Vista application compatibility resources.

Is there anything in particular that those interested should take a look at?

MShaw: Yes. I would first take a look at the Application Compatibility Cookbook that is located here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/reference/appcompat/default.aspx. This is the first document developers should look at concerning application compatibility. We have identified and addressed the major areas affecting applications when changing from Windows XP to Windows Vista. I’d like to point out the section on Computer Defaults as this is one big area that developers should take a close look to ensure compatibility for users.

Thanks to Michael Shaw for taking the time to talk with us and to Scott Laster who manages these sites. If you have specific questions about devreadiness or the Application Compatibility Cookbook, let us know.

-Michael

Talking Mono with Miguel de Icaza

MichaelF — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 14:30:00 GMT

In this, the last of our interviews from the LANG.NET Symposium, Sam sits down with Miguel de Icaza, VP Development Platform at Novell and co-founder of Ximian. Miguel is also responsible for starting two Open Source project you may have heard of: GNOME and Mono.

In this interview Sam and Miguel talk about the history behind Mono, the current state of the project and Miguel's thoughts on Mono as it relates to .NET.

Video: Talking Mono with Miguel de Icaza

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Black Hat US 2006: Networking & Heap Manager Updates with the Core Windows Team

jcannon — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:38:00 GMT

At this year's Black Hat Security Conference, several engineers on the Windows Networking & Security teams will be presenting <for the first time, ever> on a number of technical topics, ranging from the new improvements made to the reliability & performance of the OS Heap Manager, to the NetIO stack—a re-architected and re-written TCP/IP stack. Our discussion on this podcast has three distinguished engineers discussing their work with Sam, including:

Noel Anderson - Group Manager on the Windows Wireless Team (IP Stack for Bluetooth & Wi-Fi)
Adrian Marinescu - former member of the Windows Kernel team, LPC, Object Manager & Heap Manager. This past year, Adrian has focused his work on Vista's Heap Manager.
Aboldate Gbadegesin - Architect on Core Networking on Windows (TCP/IP & related protocols, tools & components)

We'll cover their respective areas of work & discuss the topics being presented at Black Hat for those that cannot attend.

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