Jason Zander is the General Manager of the Visual Studio team in the Developer Division at Microsoft Corporation.  As GM, Jason’s team responsibilities include the core VS IDE platform, C++, C#, VB, Javascript, the DLR (with IronRuby and IronPython), Mobile (Visual Studio for Devices and the .NET Compact Framework), Phoenix, Office Tools (VSTO/VSTA), Popfly, and several groups doing some advanced work we aren't yet talking about <g>. 

As one of the original developers of the CLR, Jason’s primary technical area of contributions include file formats, metadata, compilers, debugging/profiling, and integration of the system into key Microsoft products such as Windows and SQL Server.  Before becoming GM of Visual Studio Jason was the GM for the .NET Framework team.  Jason also held several roles on the CLR team including Product Unit Manager and Development Manager.  Prior to working on the CLR, Jason worked on the Repository and SourceSafe products and before that on the first two versions of ODBC.  Before joining Microsoft in 1992, Jason worked at IBM on Distributed SQL and SQL/400 at the Rochester lab.  Jason holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from MSU.  In his spare time, Jason enjoys playing with his three children and making furniture in his shop.  Jason's blog can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz.

Visual Studio 2010: Making your day easier

Recently Microsoft announced Visual Studio 2010, the next release of the market leading Visual Studio toolset. This release delivers advances through the following focus areas: riding the next-generation platform wave, inspiring developer delight, enabling emerging trends such as cloud computing, and democratizing application life-cycle management (ALM). In his keynote, Jason will talk about what the team is doing as the leader of the Visual Studio division at Microsoft to make a developer’s job easier with this release and provide extensive examples with Visual Studio 2010 demonstrations.

Pat Helland has been working in Databases, Transaction Processing, Scalable Systems, Fault Tolerant Systems, Messaging Systems, and Service Oriented Architectures for 30 years.

After dropping out of college to feed the kids, Pat took a few jobs in Southern California before moving to Silicon Valley in 1978. There he worked at a startup called BTI Computer Systems to implement a database management system with his college buddy. They designed an implementation language and implemented a compiler, parser generator, btree subsystem, ISAM, and primitive DML before the "startup" shifted to being a "shutdown".

So in 1982, Pat started working at Tandem Computers where he inherited big chunks of the code for TMF (Transaction Monitoring Facility) which provided the database logging, recovery, archival, a disaster recovery for the NonStop System. During his tenure, this evolved from simple file access to NonStop SQL. In 1984 and 1985, Pat decided the code base was a complete pile of garbage and so he rewrote most of it against direct orders from management. Fortunately, the rewrite worked, the product became reliable, and he didn't get fired. By 1991, Pat had left Tandem to work at HaL Computers where he dabbled in hardware and architected a CC-NUMA (Cache Coherent Non-Uniform Memory Architecture) multiprocessor which was shipped by Fujitsu.

In 1994, Pat was approached to develop enterprise software for a company in Washington State that built software for tiny little PCs. Since that seemed so preposterous, he had to accept. Pat helped start the team that built Microsoft Transaction Server and Distributed Transaction Coordinator which shipped in 1996. By 1999, he was having serious doubts about N-tier computing and helped to found the team that built SQL Service Broker. By 2002, his bad karma caught up with him and his boss, Peter Spiro, asked him to work on WinFS. After more than a year of WinFS, talking to customers seemed like a sane thing to do and Pat spent 18 months doing evangelism and talking about the challenges of building large scale service oriented systems.

For two years, Pat worked at Amazon on the Amazon Product Catalog and the system that handles product pricing from multiple merchants. This system processed hundreds of millions of feeds per day to organize tens of millions of product definitions and pricing quotes. He returned to Microsoft in March of 2007 and worked in DevDiv on Rich Internet Applications using Silverlight.

Pat is now back working on Architecture for SQL... His job is to both help in general architectural issues and to launch an incubation for a future set of features in SQL. His area of interest for this incubation is a self-managing scalable application and data platform.

Pat is active in the transaction processing and database industry and has been chairman of the High Performance Transaction Workshop (HPTS) a number of times. He has chaired numerous internal Microsoft conferences. Pat still finds time to make PowerPoint animations and write technical papers when his management is not looking (since it distracts him from his day job).

Green Computing through Sharing Reducing both Cost AND Carbon

Data centers consumed 1.5% of the total electricity in the US in 2006 and are on track to double as a percentage every five years.  It is about 2% of the US total in 2008.  Western Europe’s use is increasing at a slightly faster rate (from a slightly lower base percentage).  The consumption of electricity within data centers is of significant financial and environmental importance.

• Where the heck is all this power going? 
• Why is the electrical load increasing so much? 
• What can be done about it?

This talk will examine both traditional and emerging data center designs.  We will start by examining how a data center is laid out, constructed, and managed.  We will show two emerging trends:  the change to designing data centers for the optimization of power and the emergence of new economies of scale in data centers which is contributing to the drive towards cloud computing.  Microsoft is actively moving to compete in the space of cloud computing as we are seeing at the PDC (Professional Developers Conference) a few weeks before Tech·Ed EMEA Developer.

Next, we will examine the sources of waste in the system today and examine why so many of our resources are underutilized.  Because we are reluctant to share computing resources, they are left idle much of the time.  Why is this currently the dominant choice?  What can be done in the design of applications, systems, and data centers to make them more green (both carbon and cash)?  What can developers do to make a difference?