Recently, we visited MSR Cambridge (not surprisingly, this division of MSR is located in Cambridge, England) to meet some of the great minds working there. In this case, we were fortunate enough to get an hour's time with Simon Peyton-Jones and Tim Harris, who are researchers working on a very hard problem: making it easier (more predictable, more reliable, more composable) to write concurrent applications in this the age of Concurrency (multi-core is a reality, not a dream).

Specifically, Simon and Tim (and team) are working on a programming technology called Software Transactional Memory (STM) which enables elegant, easy to use language abstraction that is based on widely-understood conceptual constructs like Atomic operations (and, well, Transactions...).

Also available:

• Windows Vista WAVE - Windows Audio Video Excellence
  Back in January of 2006, Scoble visited Steve Ball, Kirt Debique and the WAVE (Windows Audio Video Excellence) team to discuss their contributions to Windows Vista. WAVE is the team responsible for Audio and Video infrastructure in Windows including, among other things AV class drivers, rendering and capture APIs (including DirectShow and Media Foundation), and end to end AV performance.



• Ifeanyi Echeruo: Testing WPF - UI Fuzzing with InvokeStress
  One of the best ways to guarantee a robust application is to create automated tests that can be run repeatedly on any build. But how do you test UI? Ifeanyi Echeruo is a tester on the WPF team who has written a cool tool using the UI Automation framework for exactly that purpose. Join Dr Sneath as he finds out more…