Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : sam ramji, Video

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.

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/

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.

Something wonderful has happened... Number Five is alive!

jcannon — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:03:00 GMT

Last week, Microsoft released the first version of Robotics Studio, an SDK that contains three sets of tools; first, a common runtime architecture that can be used across robot devices; second, a set of programming tools that harness the power of Visual Studio, and a physics engine, to allow programmers to build & test their robots in simulated 3D space; and finally, a set of tutorials and sample code to get started. In this video (there are two - we'll post the second tomorrow), we learn a little bit about the design goals & architecture behind Robotics Studio...tomorrow we have some very cool demo time with the team.

Why is robotics such an interesting area to watch? According to the latest statistics from the International Federation of Robotics, about 1 million personal robots will be sold around the world this year. And by 2025, the Japanese Robot Association predicts the personal robot industry will be worth more than $50 billion a year worldwide.

Video: MPEG4 Available Something wonderful has happened... Number Five is alive!

Additional Links:
- Robotics Studio Home Page
- Download Robotics Studio (Free for Non-Commercial Use)
- Channel9 Interview

From Atlas to ASP.NET AJAX: Sam Interviews Brad Abrams

MichaelF — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 19:31:00 GMT

Brad Abrams, Group Program Manager for the .NET Framework, sits down with Sam to discuss all things AJAX including: the Open AJAX Alliance, Atlas, the Microsoft AJAX Library and cross browser compatability. Brad also does a quick demo near the end of the video.

Video: From Atlas to ASP.NET AJAX: Sam Interviews Brad Abrams

Related Links:

ASP.NET AJAX homepage: http://ajax.asp.net
Shanku Nyogi's (Product Unit Manager for UI Framework and Services Team) blog: http://www.shankun.com/Atlas_Php_2.aspx
Brad's Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/brada

Video: From Atlas to ASP.NET AJAX: Sam Interviews Brad Abrams

Socialpoint - Socialtext on Sharepoint a conversation with Ross Mayfield

Sam Ramji — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 21:15:00 GMT

I got to spend an hour with Ross Mayfield (founder of Socialtext) today. We talked about a range of things, from open source calculators (WikiCalc) to the future of Sharepoint as a platform for open source development and the shift in Microsoft's approach to open source. Ross graciously gave us an extra ten minutes to capture part of our conversation on video.

Socialtext was the first commercial wiki company, built initially on the Perl-based Kwiki and Ross has been a leader in the democratization of this collaboration technology for many years. For more on social computing, you can check out Wikipedia. By now, unless you work with a group of card-carrying Luddites, you have probably even browsed a wiki within your company run by your own IT department or wiki enthusiasts. In this case you’ve already entered the current wave of “enterprise social computing” a.k.a. “Enterprise 2.0”. Our internal wiki at the Open Source Software Lab currently runs on Plone.

About five months ago, he open-sourced part of this platform. The Socialtext Open Source Wiki has the details on this project. It currently runs on PostgreSQL and Ubuntu… but since it’s based on Perl I hope that the porting effort to SQL Server and Windows wouldn’t be too much.

Even more interesting to me given my role at Microsoft is that Socialtext has built a Sharepoint integration ("Socialpoint"). This gives Sharepoint users access to a best-of-breed wiki and blogging engine while retaining presence, Office integration, and a unified portal infrastructure. My inner geek got going when Ross described the new protocol handler they’ve built - "socialpoint:foo/bar" - for navigating within Sharepoint across wikis. I think this is a good example of how Microsoft platform software should be combined with open source applications. We continue to invest in scaling the infrastructure, and open it up to developers for innovative applications that can change as often as customers require.

Ross is thinking about releasing these modules under open source licenses. I’m hopeful that the MS-PL (BSD-like) or MS-CL (Apache-like) will prove worthwhile to him, and that Codeplex will turn out to be the right repository for the work - but regardless of the license or the community site, I'm excited to see that the Microsoft platform and open source software companies can propel great technology into broad adoption - carrying innovation into remote corners of the enterprise.

For more details on the conversation - and to catch Ross' insights first-hand - check out the video interview.

Cheers,

Sam

Video: Socialpoint - Socialtext on Sharepoint a conversation with Ross Mayfield

Alternate Video Format

-Download MPEG4 Video

Network Security Interoperability: Sam talks NAP/NAC with Mark Ashida

MichaelF — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 22:13:00 GMT

On September 6, 2006 Microsoft and Cisco announced the details of a technical partnership announced in October of 2004 focused on providing interoperability between the companies' disparate network security technologies: NAC and NAP. In this interview Sam digs into the details with Mark Ashida, General Manager of the Enterprise Networking Group. They also discuss Xorp and why Mark believes his is one of the most "open" groups at Microsoft.

As part of the announcement a whitepaper with details was produced and can be found here.

Video: Network Security Interoperability: Sam talks NAP-NAC with Mark Ashida

Alternate Video Format
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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

Alternate Video Format
-Download MPEG4 Video