Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Brent Rector

Tassaduq Basu

Jerry Jay Dunietz

Martyn S Lovell

Mahesh Prakriya

Elliot H Omiya

Lawrence William Osterman

Stephen C Rowe

Ales Holecek

Wei Zeng

Patrick Henri Dussud

Steven E Lucco

Raja Krishnaswamy

Robert Albert Wlodarczyk

Noel Richard Cross

Michael Aksionkin

James F Springfield

Shakeel Solkar

Neeraj Wadhwa

Harold Pierson

Lin Xu

Michael C Fanning

Jackson Michael Davis

Krzysztof J Cwalina

Brian M Grunkemeyer

William Robert Messmer

Barend Hermanus Venter

Thomas E Quinn

Adriaan W Canter

Saji Abraham

Sameer Bhangar

Justin Kwak

Darryn Owen Lavery

Jeff Young

Lawrence W Osterman

Technologies for a contract platform versioned according to the set of API contracts provided. API contracts are both development-time and run-time executable components. Each such contract defines a particular set of APIs that are fully supported at run-time by a corresponding implementation module. Contract applications are written to API contracts as opposed to the monolithic APIs of a legacy platform. Such applications are 'platform agnostic'.

API versioning independent of product releases

Systems and methods for managing the lifecycle of an API over a number of different versions of an operating system&#x2014;as well as over a number of different platforms are disclosed. In one embodiment, a method is disclosed wherein for a given API, metadata is created and associated with certain constructs of the API. The metadata may comprise a version indication. A set of versioning rules may be defined. Such versioning rules govern whether a particular construct of an API may be changed for a given version. These versioning rules may be enforced at the time of constructing a new build. The versioning rules may be enforced by the IDE system.

API lifecycle platform and version management

Various embodiments provide an ability to describe, independent of a programming language, one or more interfaces associated with an operating system. Alternately or additionally, a compiler associated with a specific programming language can be configured to map the independent interface description(s) to the specific programming language. In some embodiments, an application can be configured to programmatically determine one or more interfaces of the operating system.

Runtime system

The claimed subject matter provides for systems and/or methods for debugging a computer-executable file. The computer-executable file may be executing in a first runtime environment and located in a first process. The file may further comprise on object having a proxy in that first runtime environment. One method embodiment comprises the steps of debugging said computer-executable file; detecting a proxy for an object called by said file; decoding said proxy to obtain physical information regarding said object; returning said physical object information; and transforming said physical object information into logical object information. In addition, one embodiment of a system is provided that comprising a debugger, said debugger debugging client code; a proxy decoder, said proxy decoder providing information to said debugger about the object pointed by said proxy; and an abstraction transformation, said abstraction transformation transforming physical expressions of a proxy into higher level logical expressions.

Debugging object abstractions

Information about the operating system application programming interfaces is stored in a known format in a known location. This information fully describes the APIs exposed by the operating system and is stored in API metadata files. A language compiler or interpreter uses this API information to build a natural and familiar representation of the native system API in the target language. The language compiler or interpreter can read the API information at compile time and/or runtime. The metadata is used to allow an application to refer to named elements in the API. Projections are built that use the metadata to map named elements in the API to named elements in the target language, and to define wrappers that marshal data of those elements between the target representation and the native operating system representation.

Projecting native application programming interfaces of an operating system into other programming languages

An assembly aggregate comprising a virtual, logical view of an arbitrarily defined collection of intermediate code and metadata can be authored, factored, accessed, modified, and distributed. Multiple physical containers of assembly information can be aggregated to create a single logical assembly called an assembly aggregate. An assembly can thus be redefined as a logical view against (or projection over) the assembly aggregate. Such an assembly can be targeted to the requester: that is, an assembly can be redefined according to tool and/or execution context rather than conforming to explicit or implicit requirements enforced by the runtime.

Logical extensions to intermediate code

A method and system for dynamically downloading custom code for execution within a host application is provided. A deployment system augments the manifest used for deploying managed applications to include information describing how the host application is to use the custom code, referred to as host manifest information. The deployment system reports the progress of the downloading of the manifest and the custom code to the host application. The host application can then perform appropriate host-specific processing. The host application may provide to the deployment system an interface for verifying the trust of the custom code. The deployment system also allows the host application to control the uninstalling of the custom code.

Dynamic deployment of custom code

Growing community of inventors

Redmond, WA, United States of America

Brent Rector