The Windows heap manager has been around as long as Windows has, evolving with each release, getting faster, more reliable, and more secure. In Windows 8, the heap manager improves in two major areas: performance and security. In this video, Greg Colombo, a developer on the Windows kernel team working on the Windows heap manager, digs into the details. What are the changes that positively impact performance and security?This conversation—conducted entirely at the whiteboard—provides enough...

Andrei Alexandrescu presents "Systematic Error Handling in C++". This was filmed at C++ and Beyond 2012 Abstract: Writing code that is resilient upon errors (API failures, exceptions, invalid memory access, and more) has always been a pain point in all languages. This being still largely an unsolved (and actually rather loosely-defined) problem, C++11 makes no claim of having solved it. However, C++11 is a more expressive language, and as always more expressive features can be put to good use...

Andrei Alexandrescu presents "Systematic Error Handling in C++". This was filmed at C++ and Beyond 2012 Abstract: Writing code that is resilient upon errors (API failures, exceptions, invalid memory access, and more) has always been a pain point in all languages. This being still largely an unsolved (and actually rather loosely-defined) problem, C++11 makes no claim of having solved it. However, C++11 is a more expressive language, and as always more expressive features can be put to good use...

Continuing with our series of conversations with engineers in Windows, we meet Pedro Teixeira, a software developer on the Windows kernel team (aka core OS) who has improved the Windows thread pools in Windows 8. Thread pools are thread management subsystems (user mode and kernel mode) where threads are created and queued for any number of arbitrary tasks (work) required by applications and services. As it turns out, there are some significant improvements to the thread pool pattern in...

Continuing with our series of conversations with engineers in Windows, we meet Pedro Teixeira, a software developer on the Windows kernel team (aka core OS) who has improved the Windows thread pools in Windows 8. Thread pools are thread management subsystems (user mode and kernel mode) where threads are created and queued for any number of arbitrary tasks (work) required by applications and services. As it turns out, there are some significant improvements to the thread pool pattern in...

Arun Kishan digs into the low level details of Windows 8's new application model. How has Process Lifetime Management (PLM) been reimagined in Windows 8? How does app suspension work, exactly, or, what happens when an app is no longer in the foreground and not closed? How much work can you do in the background when an app is suspended? Arun covers several topics here, so please do set aside some quality time. In return, you will gain new levels of deep understanding that will help you take...

Arun Kishan digs into the low level details of Windows 8's new application model. How has Process Lifetime Management (PLM) been reimagined in Windows 8? How does app suspension work, exactly, or, what happens when an app is no longer in the foreground and not closed? How much work can you do in the background when an app is suspended? Arun covers several topics here, so please do set aside some quality time. In return, you will gain new levels of deep understanding that will help you take...

By now you've learned that the CLR, Windows Phone Client, and Windows Phone Services teams got together to develop "Compiler in the Cloud". All Windows Phone 8 apps written in .NET technologies will get the benefit of this collaboration. The end goal? Really fast startup of Windows Phone 8 .NET apps. "Compiler in the Cloud?", you ask. The idea is pretty simple. First, enter MDIL or Machine Dependent Intermediate Language or .NET hybrid assembly language. MDIL is all about compiling to native...

By now you've learned that the CLR, Windows Phone Client, and Windows Phone Services teams got together to develop "Compiler in the Cloud". All Windows Phone 8 apps written in .NET technologies will get the benefit of this collaboration. The end goal? Really fast startup of Windows Phone 8 .NET apps. "Compiler in the Cloud?", you ask. The idea is pretty simple. First, enter MDIL or Machine Dependent Intermediate Language or .NET hybrid assembly language. MDIL is all about compiling to native...

Technical Fellow Steve Lucco (architect and lead engineer of IE's Chakra JS VM) and Google's V8 and Dart architect Lars Bak discuss JavaScript, from a virtual machine perspective (implementer's view point). IE and Chrome employ different strategies (although they do share some things in common) to make JavaScript execute faster. What are these strategies? How do Chakra and V8 differ? How are they similar? How fast can Lars and Steve make JavaScript go, anyway? What's the speed limit for...

Technical Fellow Steve Lucco (architect and lead engineer of IE's Chakra JS VM) and Google's V8 and Dart architect Lars Bak discuss JavaScript, from a virtual machine perspective (implementer's view point). IE and Chrome employ different strategies (although they do share some things in common) to make JavaScript execute faster. What are these strategies? How do Chakra and V8 differ? How are they similar? How fast can Lars and Steve make JavaScript go, anyway? What's the speed limit for...

TypeScript, a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to idiomatic (normal) JavaScript, is designed to make it easier to write cross-platform, application scale, JavaScript that runs in any browser or in any host. It was announced recently while Anders Hejlsberg and other key members of the TypeScript team were attending and speaking at the goto conference (an excellent cross-platform developer event!). Needless to say, Channel 9 was there Google's V8 and Dart chief architect Lars Bak...

Scott Meyers presents "Universal References in C++11". This was filmed at C++ and Beyond 2012. This is the full session in all of its splendor. Huge thanks to Scott for allowing C9 to provide this excellent C++11 content to the world. From Scott's recently published article in the October 2012 edition of ACCU's Overload: Given that rvalue references are declared using "&&", it seems reasonable to assume that the presence of "&&" in a type declaration indicates an rvalue...

Scott Meyers presents "Universal References in C++11". This was filmed at C++ and Beyond 2012. This is the full session in all of its splendor. Huge thanks to Scott for allowing C9 to provide this excellent C++11 content to the world. From Scott's recently published article in the October 2012 edition of ACCU's Overload: Given that rvalue references are declared using "&&", it seems reasonable to assume that the presence of "&&" in a type declaration indicates an rvalue...

Here is the Ask Us Anything panel from C++ and Beyond 2012. Andrei Alexandrescu, Scott Meyers and Herb Sutter take questions from attendees. As expected, great questions and answers! Tune in! Table of contents (click the time codes ([xx:xx]) to hear the answers...): Message passing primitives in future versions of the standard... [00:00]Standardized unit testing framework... [02:55]std::async... [04:30]Standard modules proposal... [08:14]Keyword additions and the standard library......

Channel 9 was invited to this year's C++ and Beyond to film some sessions (that will appear on C9 over the coming months!) and have a chat with the "Big Three": Andrei Alexandrescu, Scott Meyers, and Herb Sutter. If you are a C++ programmer, then you know these names very well. If you've not heard of C++ and Beyond, well, put it down as a must-attend event (let's hope they do it again in 2013!). You can see material from last year's event here.At the end of day 2, Andrei, Herb and Scott...

Rx 2.0 is RTW! Get it here. I caught up with Bart at his whiteboard (of course) to discuss the significance of this release as well address some of the great additions to Rx as outlined below (many of the topics below have been discussed in depth in other Rx interviews with Bart.) We also talk about the new experimental build shipping model. Much of the time is spent talking about the portable libraries architecture for Rx for Windows 8, .NET 4.5, WP7/7.5 and beyond. Bart has been very, very...

Bart De Smet is back and he's going to go deep into improvements made to Rx 2.0 RC (so, Rx 2.0 getting close to coming out of the oven!). As you'd expect, Bart and company have been very busy since Rx 2.0 Beta - lots of performance and reliability improvements and some heavy work in how Rx manages time, new error handling capabilities and event subscription improvements for Rx running on WinRT. Most of the time is spent at the whiteboard - very comfortable and natural place for Bart! Note:...

At Lang.NEXT 2012, several conversations happened in the "social room", which was right next to the room where sessions took place. Our dear friend, Erik Meijer, led many interesting conversations, some of which we are fortunate enough to have caught on camera for C9. We'll begin with these Expert to Expert episodes with a "standing" conversation (participants stand comfortably close to the whiteboard) with computer scientists Carl Hewitt, Visiting Professor at Stanford University, creator of...

Rx v2.0 Beta is here! Who better to tell us all about it - and in great detail at the whiteboard - than Bart J. F. De Smet. This is a long interview, so take your time. Watch it in parts or at one sitting. There was no easy way to dice this up into separate videos, so we give it to you as it happened - in one take. As usual, Bart's explanations are thorough and clear. Enjoy. Learn. Rx has a come a long way and there's a great deal of new, improved reactive goodness in 2.0! Congratulations to...