"knowledge miners" such as required and promised by the new class of NUI interfaces will finally lead to what has so far been an elusive goal: the markup of the web for ontological processing of the web through semantic means. It will do this by adding to content creators and data providers something that has so far lacked in the purely academic realms of the semantic web: a profit motive.

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Pretty impressive milestone right at the end of the year. You can catch the release notes here . The biggest piece of new functionality may be webhdfs , a complete REST based implementation for accessing HDFS over HTTP. You can use common tools like curl/wget to access HDFS as well as supports all HDFS user operations including reading files, writing to files, making directories, changing permissions, and renaming. The benefits of this are easy to understand. For awhile people could use hftp from...

Chances are good if you are a just starting out software engineer knowing MapReduce inside and out is as important now as knowing how to configure a LAMP stack was in the last decade. Therefore, most developers will want to have a local instance to learn and experiment without having to go down the route of virtualization. Although there are a lot of competing MapReduce implementations out there , Apache Hadoop has gotten a lot of enterprise traction, with most PaaS vendors such as Amazon and Microsoft...

I am attempting to have a “holiday” from Microsoft these next two weeks, which I am told means I should sit around, enjoy reading some good books I’ve collected from all the visiting dignitaries and thinkers that cross by Microsoft’s campus and hock their books in the back of the lecture hall, drink lots of alcohol and generally do those things that because of the crazy pace of work I cannot do. Needless to say Sunday night I found myself right back at work like a boomerang. I found myself catching...

I haven’t had lunch with Simon for awhile (it’s hard since he’s in Cambridge and only visits main campus occasionally) but he publishes papers at an amazing pace, and every time his language, Haskell, and the world gets a lot smarter. Here he introduces the concept of “roles” to aid in the problems that occur with type-level computation. Generative Type Abstraction and Type-level Computation (Extended Version) , by Simon Peyton Jones, Dimitrios Vytiniotis, Stephanie Weirich, Steve Zdancewic: Modular...

At Microsoft some products have predictable and manageable release cycles. Often released in “waves” (Office recently had a Wave 14 for instance, resulting in Exchange 2010 and Office 2010) you can anticipate a period of creativity and envisioning at the beginning, a period of hard work coding and hacking in the middle (this is when you sleep in your office) and a period of release and downtime, often accompanied with a ship party where you let off steam and recharge. Around this time most PMs and...

For the last few months, some of us Microsoft Online engineers has been working hard on something great for our customers and partners. For the first time businesses and consumers who prefer BlackBerry® devices will be able to purchase both Exchange Online services and Hosted BlackBerry® services together in the cloud without needing additional servers or software and experience the full range of BlackBerry features such as push email, calendar and address book through their device. All you need...

A few people have been getting the following error when trying to Build a project after installing Visual Studio 2010 RC: The OutputPath property is not set for project 'CloudService7.ccproj'.  Please check to make sure that you have specified a valid combination of Configuration and Platform for this project.  Configuration='Debug'  Platform='MCD'. There are variations on this “Platform=” bit, as I got HCD on my machine. After about an hour of diving in to my build properties and...

  This entry seeks to provide you with a quick and easy way to get up to speed on Azure quickly by deploying your own personal website as an MVC application in to the cloud. Consider it a “Hello World”. I will do the following: Demonstrate how to write and deploy a simple Azure hosted website Demonstrate how to to create your own image and content server using Azure Storage and expose your content publically through URLs Demonstrate how to use new tools like Azure Storage Explorer to access...

If I go in to my excellent academic article organizer, Papers , and search for "software transaction memory" or "stm" I get at least 30 results of papers both high level and detailed regarding this next big thing that will allow us to finally, without any effort, take advantage of our multi-core CPUs and handle all the nasty locking and synchronization issues for us with nothing more than a language keyword. So much publicity has been given to this idea that no less than three presenters at the Google...

One of the things that is hard to get my head around is what to be secret about and what I am free to talk about. Therefore, I have decided to not talk about what I'm working on very much. Some choose not to talk at all. I considered that, and can see the merit. However, I also like participating in the community quite a bit. This awkward compromise will have to do. There has been a lot of changes working for Microsoft - but it is also the most challenging and rewarding job I've ever had. Being part...

One of the things in all the better Leadership training seminars I've been to in my career has been the insistence and dedication to reality. Usually the best strike hard by announcing a string of facts about what is changing that is causing organizational problems and asking everyone to confront them. There are some that have taken this advertising campaign as a validation that their world has not changed. Some that continue to believe we can maintain the way things have existed - the way our...

Now that the summer is over – the tech industry is back to work – and the new products and service announcements are coming quick, why not do some good reading to prepare for the fall when everyone returns from vacation and you get back to the serious business of deadlines, programming and of course geeky arguments about the topics of the day. Here is a good reading list to bookmark. Get up to speed of Generic Programming, or Programming In General My first recommendation is the collected papers...

A while ago ACM embarked on an ambitious mission: to change their flagship publication, Communications of the ACM, for Association for Computing Machinery members, in to the JAMA of Computer Science. If this new issue of the re-designed CACM is any indication, they will succeed. In the first few pages we have quantum computing, modeling to eliminate errors in software, an analysis of cloud computing, a debate about the future of the computer science curriculum and what it means for their career path...

An interesting post from Nathan Marz regarding an abstraction layer from Chris Wensel called Cascading : We have been doing a lot of batch processing with Hadoop MapReduce lately, and we quickly realized how painful it can be to write MapReduce jobs by hand. Some parts of our workflow require up to TEN MapReduce jobs to execute in sequence, requiring a lot of hand-coordination of intermediate data and execution order. Additionally, anyone who has done really complex MapReduce workflows knows...

This is a screenshot of Mesh running on the Silverlight platform on Mac OS X. Pretty neat example of the future. By the way, if your interested in developing for Live Mesh, there are some new videos posted on Microsoft Videos that provide an impressive amount of content. The RESTful services and the Pub/Sub model are of particular interest to me, since I think it will unleash a host of service aggregation possibilities in the future. The ability to ask the cloud to give you JSON or RSS without mapping...

Over at Lambda The Ultimate, the best academic programming blog on earth, there is a large debate going on regarding what the future of languages will be for 2008. The most important thing to emerge from the discussion is the larger role functional programming will play. It seems like a safe bet. This year has seen the explosion of interest and creation of functional languages such as Apple OS X's Nu , Java's JVM using Scala and Microsoft Research's .Net language F# . I am ecstatic at this change...

If you are looking for a good collection of notes regarding the topics covered at the Seattle Conference on Scalability , you can do no better than what James Hamilton put together . Instead, I'll write a quick commentary on what I experienced. Scalability Is Your Problem Too The goals of the conference are laudable. Scalability is an issue that almost all practitioners of software engineering face, especially as we move towards offering services both inside and outside the enterprise. Many are taken...