One of the cool new things we are doing in the security push is the conversion of all uses of potentially unsafe CRT (C Runtime) functions to their new, safe counterparts. When we think of unsafe CRT functions, we usually think of string manipulation functions and these functions are probably indeed...

Open source courses based on .NET are a great resource both for creating courses at other universities and for people who simply want to use the materials to learn something on their own about either .NET in general or Rotor. I know of two such courses available today from the University of Linz in Austria...

To date there has been no standard set of benchmarks that do something meaningful, run on Rotor and execute long enough to enable performance measurements. Standard benchmarks are very important for publishing research results because they make easier to understand what applications are being presented...

IVNET’05 (Conference of Innovative Views of .NET Technologies) is another conference related to CLI. Its scope is actually much larger but the CFP lists a few areas relevant to my Rotor blog. The two most obvious ones are programming languages and CLI implementations . IVNET’05 will be held...

I returned yesterday from the MSR Academic Days . These events were quite interesting. Organizers of the event in Portugal made the slides used for presentations available on-line . Slides for my Rotor presentations are there . In addition to Rotor, the presentation also mentions Semiworks and Phoenix...

As mentioned earlier , we have the final list of researchers awarded grants for proposed work related to Rotor. The list is now public . Check it out: there are many very exciting projects there.

Jan has just announced that he created a project with the modifications needed to build and run Rotor on versions of MacOS, FreeBSD and Windows that were released since Rotor was shipped. This servicing project is available at http://servicing.sscli.net The following new OS versions are supported...

I will be giving talks about Rotor next week in Vilamoura in Portugal and the week after that in Barcelona in Spain . If you are interested in Rotor and will be around there, let me know even if you will not attend these events.

Last Thursday I went to the Birds-Of-A-Feather session about Rotor at the Virtual Machine (VM'04) conference . There were over a dozen attendees. Most people haven't done much work with Rotor yet and they were there out of curiosity. I managed to write down names of most but not all of the participants...

I wanted to remind you about the Birds-of-a-Feather session devoted to Rotor at the VM'04 conference this week. The BOF is scheduled for Thursday, May 6, 7:30 p.m.–10:00 p.m. You can find a description at http://www.usenix.org/events/vm04/bofs.html . The BOF is co-organized by John Gough , Peter...

One of the interesting features of CLR is the ability to control which version of a given assembly is used by an application. This mechanism is quite powerful and I thought I would create a concrete simple example to illustrate the basic concepts. My example uses at the same time three different policies...

This is the last post giving brief summaries of .h files in the clr/src/inc directory of the Rotor distribution. As usually whenever the file contains a good summary in a comment, I simply quote the comment here, otherwise I write new notes to capture the contents of the file. Comments that are copied...

palclr.h Comment: // Various macros and constants that are necessary to make the CLR portable. palstartup.h Comment: // An implementation of startup code for Rotor's Unix PAL. This file should // be included by any file in a PAL application that defines main. // palstartupw.h is the Unicode...

jitperf.h Comment: // Internal interface for gathering JIT perfmormance stats. These stats are // logged (or displayed) in two ways. If PERF_COUNTERS are enabled the // perfmon etc. would display the jit stats. If ENABLE_PERF_LOG is enabled // and PERF_OUTPUT env var is defined then the jit stats...

fuspriv.h (not in tarball) Like other *.idl files, it is copied from palrt/idl Unlike other files generated from idl, this one doesn't have a corresponding idl file anywhere in the tarball. gchost.h (not in tarball) Comment: * Common Language Runtime Profiling interfaces * * The IGCHost...

The Birds-of-a-Feather session about Rotor at VM’04 that I mentioned earlier is now officially scheduled at the conference web site: http://www.usenix.org/events/vm04/bofs.html - it is scheduled for the evening of Thursday, May 6. I hope that we can hear a lot of interesting reports about work...

dump-type-info.h Comment: Defines macros which turn the contents of "dump-types.h" into class offsets and member offsets to use with GetMemberOffset(). Used by SOS. See dump-tables.h Includes dump-types.h dump-types.h Comment: Tables needed by Minidump & SOS Generates descriptions...

Peter has recently pointed out to me that the “ Shared Source CLI Essentials ” book is quite popular on Amazon. If you look at Amazon’s page for the book , you will see that it is number 1 for readers in Redmond, WA and number 5 for Microsoft . I’m not sure what the latter “purchase...

Here’s the fourth installment of the annotations. Do people find this useful? I know that Andrew thinks that these annotations are a good idea . I would love to hear feedback from others. corpriv.h Defines two interfaces: IMetaDataHelper and IMetaDataEmitHelper and a set of functions...

Here are annotations for more files from the clr/src/inc directory. corffi.h (not in the tarball) CLR FFI (Foreign Function Interface) interfaces. Generated from corffi.idl. Note that there's another corffi.h in palrt\idl that is there to support the build process. Defines IManagedInstanceWrapper...

Here are a few more files. Enjoy! ceefilegenwriter.h Comment: // CeeFileGenWriter contains all the code necessary to actually write an exe // while CCeeGen contains everything else. This lets CeeGen.exe and the VM // share more code without forcing the VM to carry the extra code to write...

John Gough , Peter and I are organizing a Rotor BoF at the VM’04 conference in May in San Jose. Watch this space or one of the two Rotor mailing lists ( http://www.mail-archive.com/dotnet-rotor%40discuss.develop.com/ and http://mailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/dotnet-sscli/ ) for details. Peter...

The other night I spent some time with two colleagues (Jim Miller and Peter Drayton ) to look at Rotor source files and write a short annotation for each file. We looked at a few header files in the clr/src/inc directory. We thought that the experience was useful and we may sit down again and describe...

Check out a new blog by Yun Jin . A yet another person from the CLR team with a lot of interesting insights about our source code.

I talked on Thursday to Steve Blackburn and Andrew Gray who work on porting JMTk to Rotor. JMTk is a memory management toolkit that is used to implement high-performance garbage collectors. The source code of the port of JMTk to Rotor is available at http://jmtk-sscli.sscli.net/ . This is work-in-progress...