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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I thought that I would write a little about the Rotor RFP 2.0. This program will give grants to academic researchers who are using Rotor for their work. The details are available at http://research.microsoft.com/programs/europe/rotor/2004Projects.aspx but here are a few comments. The new submission deadline...