stuart kent's blog : Conferences

Most influential paper award

Stuart Kent — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:33:07 GMT

Life can throw up surprises, some nasty some rather pleasant. Well this week I received an email which was a pleasant surprise. A paper I co-wrote ten years ago, when I was a researcher before joining Microsoft, just received an award from the VL/HCC conference series: Most Influential Paper from approximately one decade ago. See http://eecs.oregonstate.edu/vlhcc09/mip.html

I’m immensely proud to find that work I contributed to has been judged to have had such an impact by research colleagues. And, having been out of research and working on product for the last five years, this came as a real surprise. I had no idea.

And the paper? It’s about formalizing a subset of a graphical notations based on Venn diagrams for visualizing navigation paths, constraints and object structures in OO systems. The paper describing the full notation appeared in the 1997 OOPSLA conference and is called Constraint Diagrams: Visualizing Invariants in Object Oriented Modelling. You can get a copy from http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/archive/people/staff/sjhk/publications/OOPSLA97/index.html.

Perhaps one day we’ll see these kinds of notations appearing in Microsoft’s tools…

Pedro on the Code Generation Conference

Stuart Kent — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:47:06 GMT

Pedro Molina has blogged about his experience at the code generation conference in Cambridge. Pedro was one of the folks with whom I had some great discussions, and his commentary on the conference is well worth reading.

News from code generation 2009

Stuart Kent — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:17:55 GMT

I’m at the Code Generation 2009 conference in Cambridge, which started yesterday.

Numbers are a little down on last year, but not much. Attendance is mostly from industry, with some academics. As usual it’s stuffed full of people with tons of experience in building code generators and languages to drive them.

I gave a talk yesterday which placed model driven development and code generation in the wider context of what I called the design cycle (see image below). Perhaps I’ll write it up as an article on this blog someday. I also illustrated this with a demo of some of the features of Visual Studio 2010, including the new tools for visualizing existing code through graphs.

Interesting panel yesterday on migrating to model driven development. There is real, concrete data out there which demonstrates the productivity benefits of an MDD approach. Why is it, then, that everyone isn’t doing it? Lots of discussion, with the top reason being social and cultural issues. It was also suggested that tooling isn’t good enough for broad use.

I’m sitting in the keynote which has an interesting format: the two invited keynote speakers (Markus Völter and Steven Kelly) decided to join forces and give a joint talk spanning the two sessions. I like it, especially when the speakers argue (e.g. textual DSLs, which Markus favors, versus graphical DSLs, which Steven favors; actually they concluded that a platform which integrates and supports both would be best).

Speaking at Code Generation 2009

Stuart Kent — Sat, 23 May 2009 00:49:03 GMT

I’m speaking at the Code Generation 2009 conference in Cambridge in June on the topic of Code-Centric or Model-Centric – Approaches to developing software.

Jean-Marc is also speaking on What’s new in the DSL Tools and T4 in Visual Studio 2010.

I’m really looking forward to going to this conference which is at the cutting edge of model-driven and code generation techniques. It will be great to meet up again with folks I haven’t seen for some time, especially colleagues I used to work with before I joined Microsoft.

And beware: “LATE BOOKING FEES APPLY FROM JUNE 1ST”