Via the article WiDS Checker: Combating Bugs in Distributed Systems I found out about WiDS: An Integrated Tool Kit for Distributed-System Development which has been available for quite some time now. That would be a great feature for a future version of Team System!

Another MSR (Cambridge) project: The goal of the Samoa Project is to exploit recent theoretical advances in the analysis of security protocols in the practical setting of XML web services. Some early outcomes of this research include an implementation of declarative security attributes for web services and the design of a logic-based approach to checking SOAP-based protocols.

Even if this doesn't sound interesting to you, the site sports a really great resources section with lots of article links, security topics, bloggers and columnists, resource hubs and more. If you are working with Web Services, check this site out!

Not strictly a developer-centric topic, ConferenceXP once again caught my attention. ConferenceXP is an MSR initiative for exploring how to make wireless classrooms, collaboration, and distance learning a compelling, rich experience by assuming the availability of emerging and enabling technologies, such as high-bandwidth wireless devices, Tablet PCs, and the advanced features in Microsoft® Windows® XP.

Now why do I bring this up here? If you are managing a virtual team (#develop) that is distributed around the globe, a scenario supported by the ConferenceXP Client 3.0 Beta is for example whiteboarding combined with realtime-chat. How cool is that? Check the release notes to see what else it might be able to do for your team!

The MSR article Why It’s A Bad Idea For Stealth Software To Hide Files had me stumble across a project of MSR, Strider. According to the description, it is "a black-box, state-based, and component-based approach to systems management and diagnostics. The statistical data analyses that we produce and the infrastructures and tools that we build help users manage their systems today and help developers design new operating systems with better manageability tomorrow."

I really like the idea of Strider Ghostbuster that is outlined in the article - to convince you to read it yourself, I'll show the overview diagram of what Ghostbuster does (Figure 1. The ScanDiff approach to exposing file-hiding software [from the aforementioned article]):

Ghostbuster allows you to find rootkits, keyloggers and other malware that hides itself from plain directory listing. How is it done? Perform a directory listing on the infected machine (step #1), boot from a WinPE CD and scan again (step #2), and then compare the two scans (step #3). You'll see immediately what was hidden, and it takes only around 15 minutes to do this - absolutely neat!

Closing words: be sure to check out the References section of the article!

Cw (Comega Web site) is a research programming language done by MSR. It is an "extension" of C# in two major areas:

• A control flow extension for asynchronous wide-area concurrency
• A data type extension for XML and table manipulation

In plain English this means new constructs for asynchronous concurrency as well as relational and semi-structured data access. If you've previously read about Polyphonic C# and X#, then this is basically the "successor".

You can download a preview.