Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Podcast, Video

Allison Randal on Participation & Motivation

Sam Ramji — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:14:00 GMT

It's taken awhile, but without further delay - we're excited to post Sam's discussion with Allison Randal that took place at this year's OSCON event in Portland, OR. Allison discusses the importance of participation in the open source community and her perspective where Microsoft sits relative to the principle that everyone deserves to participate.

From her biography on the O'Reilly site: Allison Randal is the Program co-Chair for O'Reilly's Open Source Convention and Energy Innovation Conference. Her first geek career was as a research linguist in eastern Africa. But eventually her love of coding drew her away from natural languages to artificial ones. Allison is the architect of Parrot (a virtual machine for dynamic languages), on the board of directors of The Perl Foundation, and founder and president of Onyx Neon. She co-authored Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, and has edited various O'Reilly books on dynamic languages including Perl Hacks and Programming PHP.

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Haskell in the Hallway: Sam Interviews Simon Peyton Jones

Sam Ramji — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:35:00 GMT

While at OSCON this year Sam and I got the chance to spend some time with Simon Peyton Jones, researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England and Honorary Professor of the Computing Science Department at Glasgow University. Earlier in the week Simon had presented a tutorial on Haskell titled: A Taste of Haskell at the O'Reilly event.

Taking advantage of the opportunity to have some time with Simon, we found a (sometimes) quiet hallway to talk about Haskell, functional programming and other topics.

Video: Haskell in the Hallway: Sam Interviews Simon Peyton Jones

Talking Ruby and Dynamic Language Support with John Lam

MichaelF — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 19:05:00 GMT

As promised in the first post today, here is the second interview regarding today's announcements regarding Microsoft's Dynamic Language Runtime and Silverlight. In this video Sam sits down with John Lam, who we interviewed during the LANG.NET Symposium in August (before he came to work for Microsoft), to discuss his work with Ruby and the DLR.

Video: John Lam and Sam Ramji discuss RubyCLR, Avalon Ruby Editor and Open Source Fundi

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.

Decoding Liberation: An interview with Samir Chopra

anandeep — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 23:32:00 GMT

Samir Chopra is an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at the City University of New York (CUNY), Brooklyn. He has a Master’s degree in Computer Science and a Doctorate in Philosophy and is interested in the intersection of politics and technology – specifically information technology.

Samir and I share more than our interest in Open Source (or Free Software as Samir prefers to call it!). Our fathers trained as Air Force pilots in the Indian Air Force in their teens and knew each other very well. In fact Samir (being the renaissance man that he is) has co-authored one of the most successful books on Indian Air Force history “The India-Pakistan Air War of 1965”. We contribute to an “open source” site on Indian armed forces history – you can read one of my articles (shameless plug!) on air war history here.

Samir is a Free Software proponent and recently he was invited to the Microsoft Technical Summit to exchange ideas with a wide audience from both within Microsoft and from all around the globe. I jumped at the opportunity to interview him about his forthcoming book “Decoding Liberation” and to debate with him our views of how software would evolve.

Samir’s site is http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~schopra/ (his co-author, Scott Dexter's site is http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~sdexter) and he writes a blog on Free Software which has the same title as his book.

An introduction to the book is here.
Routledge has also given us permission to post the first chapter of this book which is available now for pre-order.
Video: Decoding Liberation: An interview with Samir Chopra

Cross-Platform Access to Codeplex Compliments of our Friends at Teamprise

MichaelF — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:40:00 GMT

Awhile ago we interviewed Martin Woodward from Teamprise regarding their suite of client applications that provide cross-platform access to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.

Today Teamprise announced that they are providing complimentary licenses for the Teamprise Client Suite to developers who plan to use the license to access Codeplex. This allows projects with developers on the Eclipse IDE along with anyone on the Mac, Linux or Unix platforms to use Codeplex for hosting their projects.

To obtain access to the client go to the sign-up page.

To provide some additional information on this release and Teamprise, Anandeep sat down with Martin to catch up.

Video: Cross-Platform Access to Codeplex Compliments of Teamprise

Martin's Blog about this announcement can be found here.

Powershell in Action! Hank interviews Bruce Payette

MichaelF — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 02:00:00 GMT

We get quite a few requests to provide more information about Powershell so Hank and I decided to go straight to the person who just finished writing the book on Powershell: Powershell in Action, Bruce Payette. Bruce was one of the founders of the Powershell team here at Microsoft and is an expert on not only Powershell but according to Jeff Snover, on any number of popular and obscure languages.

In this interview Hank and Bruce discuss Powershell and Bruce gives us a demo. While we couldn't show everything here, if there is interest, we can go back and have Bruce show us specific scenarios and examples. Let us know if there is anything you'd like to see...

Check out the link above to see Bruce's book and read a couple of sample chapters.

Video: Powershell in Action! Hank interviews Bruce Payette

A Technical Look at ASP.NET AJAX

MichaelF — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 21:36:00 GMT

Following up on our post yesterday here is an interview Sam did with ASP.NET Technical Evangelist: Steve Marx.

Steve discusses the three components of ASP.NET AJAX and shows us a demo of the software formerly known as ATLAS running on top of PHP on Linux to demonstrate some of the front and backend extraction capabilities.

Video: A Technical Look at ASP.NET AJAX

If you are interested in looking a bit more deeply at ASP.NET AJAX, as well as the PHP support Steve released to Codeplex, here are some links he provided:

ASP.NET AJAX: http://ajax.asp.net/
Direct link to download the Microsoft AJAX Library: http://ajax.asp.net/downloads/library/default.aspx?tabid=47
PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library: http://codeplex.com/phpmsajax
Steve's Blog: http://smarx.com/

Can the Linux Kernel be More Maintainable? Anandeep interviews Professor Stephen Shach

anandeep — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 20:15:00 GMT

Prof Stephen R. (Steve) Schach is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at the Vanderbilt University.

Port 25 met up with him while he was visiting Seattle, Washington in picturesque Kirkland, Washington on the shores of Lake Washington.

Steve (he hates being called Prof Schach!) believes in gathering data to make predictions. While he accepts that there may be interpretations of data he thinks gathering the correct data is paramount.

He credits Open Source Software with kick starting the Empirical Software Engineering movement saying “We could count the number of lines of code in gcc and Linux – we couldn’t do that with Windows 95!”.

In this interview we discussed empirical software engineer/computer science and some of the work Steve has been doing. This includes his work on the proportion of time that code is in bug fixing mode and his work on global variables in Linux.

The latter work was found to be controversial by the Open Source Community. Steve thought that all he was doing was counting the number of global variable in Linux vs BSD and stating that Linux had far more than is considered wise! This was surprising to Steve, but isn’t that much of a surprise to the people who know how much passion Open Source can generate!

Steve’s website is here http://www.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/~srs/ and you can find his publications on his website.

Video: Anandeep interviews Professor Stephen Shach”

Sharepoint Learning Kit: Bryan interviews Mike Hines

Bryan Kirschner — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 17:00:00 GMT

There have been two journal articles lately that have stuck in my head:

First, Brian Fitzgerald writing broadly about the future of open source (“open source 2.0”) in September’s MIS Quarterly argues for the durability of OSS because it can achieve “a balance between a commercial profit value-for-money proposition while still adhering to acceptable open source community values.” Within this flexibility he describes how “the quintessential proprietary software company, Microsoft, can appear to satisfy the definition of an open source company, while a quintessential open source company, Red Hat, can appear to resemble a proprietary software company.”

That in itself is a lot to chew on, especially if you happen to work in the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft.

But then Baldwin, Hienerth, and long-time user innovation champion Eric von Hippel published an article November’s Research Policy including discussion of the relationships between high-capital, mainstream manufacturers” and “low-capital, experimental user-manufacturers” in relation to innovation. They conclude that in “design spaces”—markets or products; they use cell phones and PDA’s as an example—that are “relatively easy to expand” the high-capital manufacturers and user-innovators might “co-exist indefinitely.” As I read it, one of the key concepts is the idea of “toolkits” which split the cost of designing an innovation into a capital component (the toolkit) and the designer’s decision—thereby “reducing the time and effort needed to generate new designs” and increasing individual and possibly community capacity for innovation—“rejuvenat[ing] innovation in a design space that was previously deemed to be exhausted.”

(It’s worth pointing out that as far as I have seen, von Hippel has not historically thought of this as applying to software as opposed to physical goods—a source of no end of consternation for me, because I find it to be quite elegant, even inspiring when applied to software and maybe even further to other types of intellectual property—but that’s another blog.)

I subsequently ran across a great example of real-life business and engineering decisions by the Education Products Group at Microsoft that are a fascinating case study to which to apply these two idea. The Sharepoint Learning Kit (SLK) is (in essence) “a toolkit” for Microsoft’s SharePoint2007 designed for teachers that is being released under a Shared Source license.

We’re very pleased to have Mike Hines, a product manager with this group, stop by on his way to BETT 2007 (the Educational Technology Show) come tell us about the engineering, licensing, and business decisions they made, why —and what’s started happening as a result.

In subsequent interviews we will turn the focus on some of the cool technical work being done in community, commercial , and public-sector projects using SLK such as the project he mentions in Kent.

Video: Bryan interviews Mike Hines; Sharepoint Learning Kit

First Consulting Group: Building Physican Portal on JBoss & Microsoft

jcannon — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 22:21:00 GMT

In our final video interview featuring University Hospitals of Cleveland and their new Physician Portal, we have the opportunity to meet Joe Yelanich, Sr. Account Executive from First Consulting Group (FCG). FCG has a long history in the medical IT industry, and choose to deploy their solution on top of JBoss JEMS and Microsoft technologies.

Joe offers insight into the considerations and platform choices made from a consulting perspective, and why FCG chose a mix of JBoss, Java and Microsoft technologies to build their healthcare portal. More information is available on the technical and healthcare aspects to this solution in the previous segments. More information on FCG can be found on their website.

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Duration: 6:58

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University Hospitals of Cleveland: Healthcare Perspectives

jcannon — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 22:31:00 GMT

Yesterday, we published the first of three video interviews with University Hospitals of Cleveland, discussing their new Physician Portal, a healthcare solution built on top Windows Server and JBoss middleware system. Ed Marx, Hospital CIO, discussed the IT needs of the hospital, and how they arrived at a solution that built on - and took advantage of - both open source and Microsoft technologies.

Today, we get an opportunity to speak to Dr. Nathan Levitan, Chief Medical Officer & Senior VP of University Hospitals, and Dr. Ed Michelson, Chairman of Emergency Medicine. Each doctor provides insight into the healthcare impact of how different, disconnected legacy systems materially impacted the quality of care provided to patients, and how the implementation of the portal has been successful in linking patient information among, and within, its various network of 150 locations. In addition, management, usability and security are also covered from an end-user's perspective.

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Duration: 10:16

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University Hospitals of Cleveland: Physician Portal built on JBoss and Microsoft Solution

jcannon — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 20:43:00 GMT

In late 2005, you may recall that Microsoft and JBoss announced a joint technology agreement to explore ways to better enhance interoperability between JBoss Enterprise Middleware Systems (JEMS) and Windows Server. This was an exciting announcement and a great opportunity to explore ways in which the two companies could work together for our joint customers.

Recently, we had the fortunate opportunity to visit one such customer, University Hospitals of Cleveland, who has implemented a joint JBoss/Microsoft solution. The result, a new hospital-wide Physician Portal, allows hospital clinicians to access multiple, diverse patient care systems as though they were one. The reduced complexity and enhanced interoperability not only save the hospital money, but improve the standard and quality of patient care.

In Part 1 of our interview - done on-site & in partnership with industry moderator Bill Laberis - we explore the technical perspectives of the solution with Hospital CIO Ed Marx. Tomorrow, we look at the healthcare perspective & will end on Friday with a discussion with First Consulting Group, the healthcare services firm who built the solution.

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Duration: 12:34

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More on University Hospitals:
University Hospitals (UH) is a community-based health care system which serves patients at more than 150 locations throughout Northern Ohio, including seven wholly owned and four affiliated hospitals.

Committed to advanced care and advanced caring, UH encompasses the region's largest network of primary care physicians, outpatient centers and hospitals. The network also offers specialty care physicians to treat almost every disease and condition, skilled nursing, elder health, rehabilitation and home care services, and occupational health and wellness.

University Hospitals is the second largest private sector employer in Northeast Ohio and is within the top five largest private sector employers in the state of Ohio.

Robotics Redux: Demo My Robot

jcannon — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 18:26:00 GMT

If you missed our post yesterday, we started a fascinating conversation with the Robotics team about the impetus and design goals of new Robotics Studio, from distributed intelligence & network-based agents, to why web browsers can provide strong interfaces to robotics control. In the second part of this conversation, we get a sense of what early work is possible with demos being run in the Robotics lab.

Video: Robotics Redux: Demo My Robot

You'll note the reference to some of the work in the Channel9 sandbox to provide open code sharing - a simulation sample tutorial is here. Feel free to dig around.