The Moth

In the latest issue of the MSDN Flash we introduced 2 new features: a poll (you'll see the results in the next issue) and the ability to have a non-MS person write the 500 word article. Kenny kindly accepted the challenge and he wrote a great article on a security topic that may affect your code on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Read it here (scroll down).

Virtualization is going to be (if it isn't already) a huge topic for anyone involved in the IT industry. I know that IT Pros are very excited about Microsoft's offering with Windows Server 2008 but I wasn't sure how many developers have at least a high level appreciation of what virtualization is and how Hyper-V fits into the big picture.

To find out, I would encourage you to spend some time browsing the numerous links and content on these sites:
1. Microsoft Virtualization.
2. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.
3. Also recently, Bob Muglia sent this executive email on virtualization, should you need something to forward to your manager.
4. Finally, see this dedicated blog.

If you have access to the TechEd Europe IT Forum 2007 post-conference recordings, there are 4 sessions that I recommend: MGT323, SVR307, SVR320 and SVR322. I watched those collective 300 minutes and (combined with what floated my boat from the other links above) distilled the most interesting bits into a 15'-20' section of my Windows Server 2008 developer session. It is from those 4 sessions that I stole the slides I used ;-). You can find them in this powerpoint deck (36-58 inclusive).

On 3 recent events I spent 20' talking about the new native threading APIs in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Here are resources as promised.

1. Thread Pool – re-architected native ThreadPool that amongst other things allows multiple pools per process.

2. One-Time Initialization – think singletons for the native world with an interesting option of asynchronous initialization.

3. Slim Reader/Writer Lock (SRW) – finally a reader writer lock out of the box for native devs.

4. Condition Variables – addresses scenarios such as the classic producer/consumer pattern in a more efficient way than previous techniques.

5. Thread Ordering Service (TOS) – an interesting service that I cannot find a compelling use case for. If you've got one, let me know!

6. Wait Chain Traversal (WCT) – aids in programmatically debugging deadlocks and hangs.

The links above point to the MSDN documentation where you can click further to read the API descriptions and click further to see code examples. In addition, the MSDN Magazine has 3 articles that describe all of the above (except for the TOS):
- June 2007 – Describes Condition vars, SRW, and One-Time Init. Don't let the title fool you, these are even more applicable with the release of Windows Server 2008.
- July 2007 – Describes usage of the WCT from unsafe C# code to create a utility.
- October 2007 – Describes the New Thread Pool APIs.

Lastly, I have created some slides for the above. Nothing fancy, just very boring bullets with lots of text and API signatures with nothing additional than what you can find in the links above. Their only use is if you need to talk about this topic and cannot be bothered to create your own from scratch, you can use mine as a starting point. See slides 8-22 inclusive in this deck.