Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Tassaduq Basu

Martyn S Lovell

Mahesh Prakriya

Elliot H Omiya

Stephen C Rowe

Lawrence William Osterman

Wei Zeng

Robert Albert Wlodarczyk

Brent Rector

Michael Aksionkin

Shakeel Solkar

Neeraj Wadhwa

Jerry Jay Dunietz

Ales Holecek

Harold L Pierson, Iii

Hart Wilson

Patrick Henri Dussud

Steven E Lucco

Raja Krishnaswamy

Sermet Iskin

Noel Richard Cross

James F Springfield

Saji Abraham

Liang Zhao

Harold Pierson

Pierre-Yves Santerre

Matthew Merry

Sriram Sarda

Mohammad Almalkawi

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

The operating system of a computer maintains an extension catalog that stores data relating extensions with information about the contracts the extensions support. Extensions are registered in this catalog according to the contract they implement. The extension catalog can be queried to identify extensions that support a given contract. An extension can be selected from among the results from a query, and the selected extension can be activated. When activated, the extension is set up by the operating system as an independent process from, and with context from, the application for which it is an extension. Information about the extension is provided to the application to enable the extension and the application to communicate according to the supported contract.

Discovery and activation of application extensions

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

An isolation execution environment provides an application with limited resources to execute an application. The application may require access to secured resources associated with a particular trust level that are outside of the isolation execution environment. A trust activation engine determines the trust level associated with a request for a resource and operates differently based on the trust level. A broker process may be used to execute components providing access to resources having a partial trust level in an execution environment that is separate from the isolation execution environment.

Trust level activation

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

Various embodiments provide an ability to abstract type resolution between multiple type systems. At least one type can be described in one or more programmatically accessible file(s). In some embodiments, an application using a different type system can programmatically access and resolve a type of the at least one type system without knowledge of a location of where a description of the type resides. Alternately or additionally, type descriptions contained in the one or more programmatically accessible file(s) can be analyzed and restructured into one or more new programmatically accessible file(s) based, at least in part, upon the type descriptions.

Flexible metadata composition

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Tassaduq Basu