DesignAndCode software development thoughts..

Quite by accident, I stumbled into Mary Jo Foley's article that mentioned the Microsoft Research Project  Drawbridge - and a Channel9 video on this.
From the Channel 9 description:
Drawbridge is a research prototype of a new form of virtualization for application sandboxing. Drawbridge combines two core technologies: First, a picoprocess, which is a process-based isolation container with a minimal kernel API surface. Second, a library OS, which is a version of Windows enlightened to run efficiently within a picoprocess. Drawbridge combines two ideas from the literature, the picoprocess and the library OS, to provide a new form of computing, which retains the benefits of secure isolation, persistent compatibility, and execution continuity, but with drastically lower resource overheads.

Some time ago, there was an idea of each application having its own Virtual Machine space to run in - and it looks like this is another step toward that goal. Not sure it will make it into Windows 8, but it would not surprise me to see this as part of Windows 9. The Drastically reduced overhead, makes me wonder if they can get this to run on an ARM processor, or phone.

In the video, the indicate that they performed an experiment of running 25 Windows 2008 R2 web servers on a 16GB machine, and then when the switched the Web Servers to use the Drawbridge approach, they were getting "north" of 270 on the same hardware -of course they would have to be very lightly used web sites.

By refactoring the API layers to other modes (pulling Win32k.dll  into a user mode layer - and a usermode version NTUM that communicates through a new "Security Monitor" that exposes only 35 functions to the NTOSKRNL) they reduced the footprint of what is needed - and this could be getting small enough to run on a phone.

The Win32K that expects a Keyboard,  mouse, and clipboard, ends up communicating to a version of the Remote Desktop Server process (on the same machine) that emulates communicating over a network - within the processes - all isolated like a virtual machine. In fact the GUI requires using RDP to the instance that Drawbridge sets up.

Because this is all running stateless - it can save the state of the Drawbridge application - compressed, and send the application to another machine - rehydrate the application state - from any machine that can get to the cloud - due to the sandbox around the application.

It also reduced the threat surface - so it is also a very strong security play.

It is very much a prototype for a small team, and there is a good deal of work to get it to work with GPU processing - e.g. not working with IE9 right now. But it is a very promising direction that I expect to hear more about -hopefully before Windows 10.. :)

I had the realization, that this music player I use while working, has a calming and focusing effect on me. A co-worker had pointed this out a few days ago, that when things get crazy I probably turn to some type of music to 'reset' and get back on track.

I remembered that musical instruments became something I turned to when young, about the time my parents divorced. I also have a memory of wearing headphones for the very first time about the age of 11.

Music and programming have been known to go together for decades.. they have been key in my professional life.
The music blocks out distractions and helps me to reduce 'context switches' and that improves my productivity.

I just had not realized how long I have been doing this, until I remembered that first set of headphones.

Everyone has to find something that gives them that 'reset' to bring back the focus - and produce their best.

Firefox 6 came out during the last week. I then see a few tools that highlight using JavaScript to process what you would expect from something in native code via a plugin.
An MP3 decoder written within JavaScript
http://jsmad.org/

A PDF viewer written in Javascript - with footnotes, color, diagrams.

http://andreasgal.github.com/pdf.js/web/viewer.html#7

This ties back to the Hanselman interview with Erik Meijer -where he refers to JavaScript as the Assembly language of the web. The low level code that other tools are beginning to compile to -example Script# and other tools - that Hanselman followed up with in additional episodes.

All this makes me wonder what is coming in Windows 8. (maybe this is why the Build Conference sold out months ahead of the event?)

However - the MP3 player link above works in Firefox and not in IE9. So there is more work to be done in the browser area, but the efforts in this area of late are really noticeable. (IE8, IE9, beta of IE10 - Firefox 4, 5 and 6 were not that far apart .. maybe too close together for some). The rapid changes to the Google Chrome browser. This increasing pace and direction of standards in the browsers is interesting, and when tied to mobile phones, and tablets as the new devices, becomes more interesting and intriguing as to where computing in general is moving. Virtualization of computing resources, cloud integration, with those hardware changes,makes for a very dynamic landscape for the 2nd decade of the 21st century.

That dynamic element, for the computing world - in this decade, assumes the world economies can stay afloat...the force that will determine acceleration, or collapse at this point.