The day started off with a presentation by the head of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative, Scott Charney. This was the first time I encountered him and he impressed me with a rather good story (and no PowerPoint slides). I am not clear about his deep technical insights, but his management and policy making skills seem out of the question. In the Q&A session he was joined by some of the people from Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Scientific Advisory Board which includes Cornell's Fred Schneider.
I skipped some of the break-out session for meetings with Microsoft Research people, but did manage to catch the presentation on XEN, about the language also knows as X#. The type system of C# is extended with a notion of streams (for example int*, which is a stream of intergers) which is the basic foundation for tuples, unions and content classes. All of this allows you to have a tighter integration with (XML) data sources and programming. X# makes use of the Common Compiler Infrastructure, which gives languages developer the ability to extend C# and also integrate their languages into visual studio more easily. Rumors are that CCI will be distributed beginning of next year. More details on X# in the paper by Meijer and Schulte.
The afternoon was filled with demos and more meetings, among which a meeting with Jim Gray and Brad Lovering to explore the role that academia can play in the GXA program. I hope that we may be able to offer some of our reliability and distributed systems expertise to further the state of the art in web services.
I really wanted to make time to meet up with Robert Scoble, but time kept slipping away, and we'll probably have to wait until the PDC
Posted by Werner Vogels at July 30, 2003 12:06 AM