Niklas Gustafsson, Principal Architect
Microsoft Developer Division

Abstract:  In this talk, Niklas Gustafsson will present Maestro, an incubation effort within Microsoft's Developer Division. Maestro is an actor-oriented language built on .NET. It shares concepts with languages such as Erlang and Ada, but also borrows heavily from the patterns used to program Internet services and sites. The core principle promoted by Maestro is isolation of concurrent components which have access to shared state only under a strictly enforced declarative single writer, multiple readers model. Between regions of shared state, all component interactions are done by passing messages where value semantics are enforced.

Maestro also provides facilities for defining data-flow networks and routing data between components within a shared memory region. The presentation will introduce all aspects of Maestro.

Bio:  Niklas Gustafsson has been with Microsoft since 2002, working first on language incubation within Visual Basic and later joining the Parallel Computing Platform team as a software architect. As a member of the PCP team, Gustafsson is primarily responsible for the design and architecture of the Microsoft Concurrency Runtime and libraries built on it. Familiarly known as ConcRT, the runtime is the foundation for all native code concurrency efforts within the Developer Division. Gustafsson is also responsible for Maestro, a language incubation effort within PCP aiming to introduce actor-oriented and data-flow programming patterns in managed code.

Before joining Microsoft, Gustafsson worked for a series of startups in the development of tools and Internet industries. He started his career over 20 years ago at TeleSoft, Inc. working on Ada compilers and runtime systems and worked on Digital Equipment's C++ compiler efforts in the early 1990s. Gustafsson has a Master of Science in Computer Engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.