MSDN DevLabs Fosters Innovation

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DevLabs has been launched to foster innovation in the developer community. The idea of the site is to release early bits and let you influence the direction of the projects shown on the site. Many of the projects come from Developer Division at Microsoft, the teams that build Visual Studio and the other developer tools.

S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Developer Division, announced DevLabs on his blog Inspiring through Innovation - DevLabs, saying, "Some of these projects will turn into features in our existing shipping products, some we will open-source for the community, others we will decide to not pursue."

There are four projects that are available on DevLabs currently:

  • Small Basic: Small Basic is a simplified programming language and environment to help teach programming to beginners.
  • PEX: Pex (Program EXploration) is an intelligent assistant to the programmer. From a parameterized unit test, it automatically produces a traditional unit test suite with high code coverage. In addition, it suggests to the programmer how to fix the bugs.
  • PopFly: Microsoft Popfly is the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, games, Web pages, and applications.
  • Chess: A concurrency testing tool for finding and reproducing concurrency Heisenbugs in your code. CHESS can find assertion violations, deadlocks, livelocks, data-races, and memory-model errors.