After nearly six years working on Visual C++ and Phoenix, I will be taking on a new job at Microsoft on the eHome team. I'm going to be working on the Media Center TV product to help bring the future of TV to you. It's been a pleasure talking with...

As you can probably imagine, we are still hard at work on Phoenix (yes, a new version of the SDK is coming, although I don't have a date yet). One of the things that I'm very interested in is what would YOU like to see in the samples and documentation...

On the Forums, someone asked the good question of "What do the C2 phases actually do?" Andy got some info from our documentation team about the phases, so I thought I'd also add them here. Expect this info in future version of the SDK: ...

This came up on an internal alias today, so I thought I would post the solution. The issue is when there is some code like the following: class BaseClass { } class InheritedClass : BaseClass { void SomeFunction() { } } And...

One of the more common questions I get about VC2005 code generation relates to the code generation of volatile on x86/x64. If we take a look at MSDN we see that it defines the semantics for volatile in VC2005 as : o A write to a volatile object...

For those of you who were interested in attending the PLDI tutorial on Phoenix, I hope you have signed up already. We actually sold out during the pre-registration timeframe! We think it will be a fun tutorial, with a strong focus on writing code. ...

I've heard several questions lately about Phoenix's ability to raise native code to MIR (Phx.FunctionUnit.SymbolicFunctionUnitState). Today Phoenix does not support raising native code to MIR. We do plan to support raising beyond LIR in the future for...

OK, first of all I'd like to start out by saying that it sounds like the CGO tutorial was a success. I wasn't there, but I've heard second hand that people really liked it. We have some of the material from the tutorial available for download now at:...

There's been quite a bit going on with Phoenix lately. Probably the biggest thing is that a new RDK has been released. Go to the Phoenix Connect site and you can download it; https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=214 From the description...

We are getting ready to have a new Phoenix RDK in time for CGO 2007 and expect to see quite a few new things in it. Probably the two most visible things is that we are enabling a lot more optimizations in c2 and the API will look very different. For...

I recently was doing some ASP.NET 2.0 work (sometimes it's good to mix up what you work on, ya know) and I had a problem where I could not debug my ASP.NET application on Vista. It was weird because the debugger would start, but then would exit immediately...

The Phoenix team will be doing a hands-on tutorial at CGO 2007, led by Andy Ayers, one of the architects on the team. I think the tutorial should be quite interesting. Not your typical tutorial. For more info, go to this link: http://www.cgo.org/cgo2007...

Today marks the first day of 2007 and so it is time for the obligatory New Year's resolutions. Here's my list of resolutions: 1) Post to my blog more regularly. I had not posted to my blog since September. That's just not great regularity. There's...

This year's OOPSLA conference (OOPSLA 2006) is being held in Portland, OR and we will be there with a Birds-of-a-Feather session (BOF). This is a great chance to chat with someone from the Phoenix team, and other like-minded tools developers who are either...

Here is the scenario: you have compiled and linked a big program – you may have even shipped it out to customers. After it was built you realize that in order to find a bug or determine some necessary information, you need to instrument a certain function...

As you probably know Phoenix supports a PlugIn model, and the c2.dll (the C++ backend) that ships with Phoenix uses this PlugIn model to allow users to write their own phases for the C++ backend. Currently, with the PlugIn model the user specifies the...

I've received a fair bit of email from various people about problems using Visual C++ Express Edition and the Phoenix RDK. Unfortunately, as of today, the Phoenix RDK is only supported with VS2005 Standard/Pro/Team System. The Express Editions are not...

Hot off the presses, the May 2006 Phoenix RDK has been released. Have fun with it, and give us feedback if you can! http://research.microsoft.com/phoenix/default.aspx And yes, I do actually have posts with some content coming up. I've just been...

One of my colleagues, Jim Hogg, was recently on Channel9 talking about this Phoenix thing. Check it out here .

I'm not sure how long the docs have been up, but there are now docs on MSDN showing some of the new Vista synchronization features. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dllproc/base/synchronization_functions.asp So we...

In the last walkthrough we looked at symbols in the symbol table, but we actually never dove into the IR of Phoenix. In this walkthrough we’re going to learn a bit about the Phoenix IR in one of the simplest programs you can imagine. This program...

A friend of mine is a second generation iPod user (she has a 60GB iPod of some sort). While I’ve used it on occasion I’ve never used it much. What I own is an iRiver H10 , and while it gets good reviews it is often considered a notch below the iPod. The...

One of the intents of this blog is to help people learn how to use Phoenix (and eventually write a book on using Phoenix to build tools). Unfortunately, it comes in increments at a time, and is based on how much time I get to post. If you’d like...

Concurrency and HPC For as long as I can remember parallel computing has been the "next big thing". Yet it always seemed to be just around the corner. Like the young child on a trip with his parents to Disneyland , “Are we there yet?”, was the question...

In this introduction to building tools with Phoenix I'm going to start with one of the simplest tools possible. What this tool does dumps the global/static variables in an image. And as it turns out, I've actually had customers ask for a tool that could...