Mike Swanson is at it again. You've seen Mike on Channel 9 before and you've probably used his SWF to XAML converter that he wrote a while back. His latest side project promises to be quite useful for conference owners who have the complex task of planning sessions for big technical events like PDC or TechED. In fact, Mike is the PDC08 content owner and this task falls squarely on his shoulders. Instead of littering his office with Post-It notes that represent sessions, speakers, session times and locations, he decided to write an algorithm to solve his problem, specifically a genetic algorithm.

This is the first epsiode of a new series on Channel 9, Data Structures and Algorithms, that will focus on, well, data structures and algorithms Each episode will feature an engineer at a whiteboard discussing solutions to algorithms that they invented or improved upon. There are many clever people who write code for Microsoft and Channel 9 will continue to highlight them and their work. This new series is an attempt to really focus the conversation to one problem and it's algorithmic solution (which will often involve the advent of new data structures).