Visual Studio 2010 is a fairly important release of the developer tool of choice for writing Windows applications. One of the important advancements in the new update is how it enables developers and architects to better visualize the assets and dependencies through UML (Unified Modeling Language) diagrams.

In this episode, Cameron Skinner gives us a quick overview of how Visual Studio 2010’s new UML visualization tool’s design might help you with better understanding the overall structure of your applications.

You may also find the following links useful:

• PDC09: Code Visualization, UML, and DSLs

• Cameron’s Blog

At PDC09, Madan Musuvathi and Sebastian Burckhardt showed off some tools (“Cuzz” and “FeatherLite”) that Microsoft Research is currently working on that may one day assist developers in addressing concurrency issues they may be having in their application. I’ve invited them to join me today to talk with us about some of the issues involved with tracking down concurrency problems, as well as how each tool works.

If you’d like more information about the tools they are working on, you may want to check out their PDC09 session, which is available here:

• PDC09 Seminar:
  Concurrency Fuzzing & Data Races

You can also find more details about what Madan and Sebastian are doing in Microsoft Research on the Microsoft Research Website:

• Cuzz
• FeatherLite
• Madan Musuvathi
• Sebastian Burckhardt

Nic Fillingham joins @anyware and @ritzy this week to talk about Channel 9 Live at MIX10.  A few months ago at the PDC event, the Channel 9 team made history, broadcasting live from the show floor for almost the entire event, and they’ll do it again at MIX.  But you don’t have to wait until March to get in on the action. You can dialogue with the team now as they plan out their speaker lineup, and you can make requests about what and from whom you want to hear.  Follow @ch9live on Twitter, or email them at ch9live@microsoft.com, and tell them what you want to see as they, like us, serve at the pleasure of the Channel 9 community. 

In case you haven’t realized it, the new trend in computer chip technology is multi-core. This is where most of the speed improvements moving forward will come from on our computers. To take full advantage of this however it is necessary to design your applications using Parallel Programming practices, also known as “parallelism”.

In today’s episode, we will meet with Stephen Toub, who will share with us some of the overarching concepts associated with parallelism, and some of the ways we are trying to empower developers to develop applications to take advantage of it.

You may also want to check out Stephen’s presentation from PDC09 on this topic here:

• Manycore and .NET 4: A Match Made in Visual Studio 2010

And here is the full set of PDC09 sessions related to parallel programming practices:

Overview:

• The State of Parallel Programming

Managed code in Visual Studio 2010:

• Manycore and .NET 4: A Match Made in Visual Studio 2010
• PLINQ: LINQ, but Faster!
• F# for Parallel and Asynchronous Programming

Native code in Visual Studio 2010:

• C++ Forever: Interactive Applications in the Age of Manycore
• Lighting up Windows Server 2008 R2 Using the ConcRT on UMS
• Developing Applications for Scale-Up Servers Running Windows Server 2008 R2

HPC Server:

• Accelerating Applications Using Windows HPC Server 2008

Research and Incubation:

• Axum: A .NET Language for Safe and Scalable Concurrency
• Concurrency Fuzzing & Data Races
• Data-Intensive Computing on Windows HPC Server with DryadLINQ
• Rx: Reactive Extensions for .NET
• Future of Garbage Collection
• Future Directions for C# and Visual Basic

The upcoming release of Sharepoint 2010 will provide features and capabilities which will allow it to directly support Silverlight development and controls. At PDC09, Paul Stubbs held a session where he showed off many of these features, and walked the audience through the process of how to utilize Silverlight from a Sharepoint website.

In this episode, I meet with Paul, and he briefly shows us how easy it is to do Silverlight development on a Sharepoint 2010 website.

If you’d like more details on this, you can view the entire session from PDC09 here:

• Sharepoint 2010 Website