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I’m writing this on my way back from the Microsoft Research Academic Days in Lisbon. Many people from the different Universities were invited, so I got to see lots of friends }:) … not to talk about how cool it is to go to an event in which you actually DON’T HAVE TO PRESENT! Holidays! };D

The event was very well organized (as is typical in Microsoft… and even tough I know ONE of the organizers was not very happy about it };P) but I was not interested in all of the contents. I’ve highlighted some of the contents presented here:

• John Lefor presented the Phoenix project, a framework that aims to help in creating the optimization, targeting and code analisys backend in compilers. Basically it reads either .NET MSIL or a definition of an AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) and helps you to study, optimize the code or even create new versions or retarget the code for different platforms. Its built on the solid foundation of all the research in compilers from Microsoft, and the presentation stated that they plan to use it internally too. Also they told it has been tested and was able to build Longhorn and the .NET JIT version of Powerpoint… so it’s something serious. They also showed some cool applications to work with the framework (for example a visual tool for examining the compiler inner works), do code optimizations, plug in your own code and such. An Academic program is being launched for Phoenix, so that you can get early access to use it in projects at Universities, and an RFP program has been launched (more info here) (Clarification: a Request for Proposals, RFP, is a program part of the MS Research University Relations actions. In this program Microsoft sponsors Academic departments that have research projects exploring issues of interest for MS Research and working with Microsoft technologies. For more details and news, check here)
• Another interesting academic program is the Windows Operating Systems Internals Curriculum Development, presented by Arkady Retik. Two of the main points of the program are: the availability of the Curriculum Development Kit on Operating Systems, a IEEE/ACM Computing curricula-conforming set of materials, including presentations, books and exercises to be used in Operating Systems classes at University level and the Project Oz, a framework for building OS courses projects based on real Windows server code. This contents will supposedly be available during this summer.
• Serge Lidin gave a wide overview of the IL Assembler, including existing projects (apart from all the compilers that use it as the backend for targeting) and modifiations made to the next version of IL, like incorporating Generics, declarative security and compilation control directives (#ifdef, #else and the like)
• Alexander Vaschillo gave a very interesting summary of the trends in database development. Mainly it commented how the industry is accepting XML standards for data storage and how XML+XSchema+XQuery (standards from W3C) can be used to perform what we do in a modern relational database with SQL. There were also excerpts on the SQLCLR, the .NET runtime that will be embedded in SQL Server 2005, allowing you to write stored procedures in managed code and perform complex operations on the server side (like searching in images). Finally, he talked about the new WinFS API and the exciting things it allows you to do. This deserves an article on its own, so you better check some of the examples on the website.
• Mark Lewin introduced Rotor, the Shared Source CLI, to the audience. For those who don’t know this is basically an implementation of the ECMA standards for .NET CLI and C#. It’s a very interesting project worth looking at, and some people use it for their university research, and it has also got a RFP program (see above). There’s even a Linux port by the people at Macadamian
• Pablo Rodríguez, from MS Research Cambridge, gave a talk on P2P content distribution showing Avalanche, a P2P system that solves some of the problems associated with this kind of networks. It was very interesting and Pablo is always a good presenter
• And let me finish with one of the best talks, given by Francisco Ortín, a “colleague” of Pablo (he’s a professor on Pablos’s former University). He shows some of the work being done at the OOTLab of the University of Oviedo working with Rotor to incorporate Structural Reflection (one of the forms of adaptiveness that permits modifying a program’s structure at runtime, for example by allowing a programmer to add/remove methods and fields from a class when executing. Good job and a very interesting talk indeed!
• There were a number of other talks in which, being less related to my areas of interest, I’m was not as keen on.

Well, and of course not all was “boring” technical content. We had very nice social dinners, one at a very nice “rodicio brasileño” (if you haven’t been to a rodicio and like meat, give it a try) and another at the Marina Museum of Lisbon, surrounded by boats of different epochs and with a fado music show at the end. A great way to enjoy some talking with those people you don’t see that often (Ivan and I were missing David a lot! snif!)

I would like to expand a little some of the content in the talks, but haven’t got time enough for that now… hope I can find some before New Year’s Eve };P