I have the “father of CLR (Common Language Runtime)”, Jim Miller, coming in to speak at UNH on Oct 9 12:30-2:00 in Kingsbury N101. Really brilliant guy and partly responsible for the birth of .NET. He definitely is the guy to speak with regards to anything .NET related.
There topics that he may talk about, here are the two talks.
Talk1:
“Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime: Is It Dynamic Enough?”
Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime (CLR) was released to the public in 2000 and was touted as a multi-language runtime. But for the first five years of its commercial life it has been mostly used for executing statically typed languages (Visual Basic, Java, C#, Eiffel, C++). There has been considerable skepticism about its ability to support more dynamic languages like Python, Perl, Ruby, and Scheme. This talk, by one of the designers of the CLR type system, introduces recent work on implementing Python on top of the CLR. I’ll also discuss how the CLR is likely to evolve in the future to make it easy to build other dynamic languages on top of it.
Talk 2:
“Microsoft .NET: What is It and What’s Next”
CLR: Internals and Future Direction: Earlier this year, Microsoft released a new version of Visual Studio including the latest version of the Common Language Runtime. I’ll talk about the implementation of some of the new technology (generics, for example). Then I’ll talk a little bit about future directions for the CLR. But I’ll leave most of the time for discussion purposes. What would you like to see in the next version of the CLR? What have you always wanted to know about how the CLR evolves over time? What technologies do you think should become part of a future CLR?
Moonlight will be mentioned
The goals of MoonLight are:
- To run Silverlight applications on Linux.
- To provide a Linux SDK to build Silverlight applications.
- To reuse the Silverlight engine we have built for desktop applications.
Jim Miller Bio:
Jim Miller is a senior architect on Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime (CLR) team. His current work is on architectural changes to allow innovation in the core of the CLR and the managed Frameworks while preserving backward compatibility. He also serves as liaison with the academic, research, and compiler communities for the CLR team.
Jim holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT and served on the faculty at Brandeis University as well as on the research staff at MIT. He has been on the research staff at Digital Equipment Corporation and the Open Software Foundation. Before joining Microsoft, he was on the senior management team of the World Wide Web Consortium, reporting to Tim Berners-Lee and in charge of work on security, electronic commerce, child protection, privacy protection, accessibility, and intellectual property protection.
Jim joined Microsoft in 1998, leading the program management team for the kernel of the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). His responsibility included garbage collection, metadata definition and file formats, intermediate language (IL) definition, IL-to-native code compilation, and remote objects. He also serves as editor for ECMA TC39/TG3, which is charged with creating an international standard for a Common Language Infrastructure. To validate this standard, Jim helped create the Shared Source CLI (also known as Rotor), a complete implementation of the standard, runnable on Windows, Macintosh, and Unix operating systems, available in source form for teaching and non-commercial purposes.
Jim Miller has designed and implemented a number of novel and useful real-world systems over more than thirty years, including:
- the Microsoft Common Language Runtime (and its shared source implementation, ROTOR);
- the PICS system for Internet content selection (1995);
- the first public implementation of the Dylan programming language (Thomas, 1993);
- an early complete programming system for a parallel computer (MultiScheme, 1989);
- the first portable implementation of the programming language Scheme (CScheme, 1983);
- the first full-function electronic mail system (Hermes, 1976);
- the first source-level debugging system for a high-level language (BDDT, 1972).