The USENIX conference is a technical undertaking dedicated to all things UNIX and some things Linux. Actually, it is nothing less than the premier event for system programmers.

Despite the UNIX-leanings, USENIX in recent years has featured some Microsoft experts, usually from the company’s research arm.  This year, at USENIX in Boston, Benjamin Livshits and Weidong Cui of Microsoft Research shared a view on the company’s work on JavaScript worms.

In the paper they proposed Spectator automatic detection and containment solution for JavaScript worms. . The Spectator software examines the traffic between a Web application and its users, looking for long propagation chains associated with worms.

Microsoft parallel extensions to .NET have undergone an update in the form of a new Community Technology Preview. Included are Coordination Data Structures, now part of the extensions.

Coordination Data Structures join Parallel LINQ and the Task Parallel Library and other elements intended to address the  new era of mulitcore processors.

Coordination Data Structures are said to contain lightweight and scalable thread-safe data structures and synchronization primitives. Apparently there is more than one way to skin a cat or facilitate communications between threads.

The Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework 3.5 libraries are downloadable  now.

Document generation is nobody’s favorite task. Microsoft has had a pre-beta automatic document generator brewing for a number of years that would help take classes, code and the like, and create documentation, saving some onerous tasking.

This long-running project took on an open-source tenor with a Codeplex download. It is suddenly dark.

Apparently, the source code was not available, making it less than open source. Microsoft apologized, and pulled the rev from Codeplex. A free download, without open-source panache, can be found on Microsoft’s download site.

The lights dim in the keynote hall, the music comes up, and Microsoft’s leader Bill Gates is announced to the developer legions at Tech Ed for the final time. That is the scene on the first week of June in Orlando as Bill Gates makes one last keynote before moving on, leaving his day job at Microsoft to take over the reins at his charitable foundation.

What would the computer and software businesses be like without Gates? Would pre-PC computer companies like IBM and DEC have held eternal sway? People can differ on the degree of responsibility Gates should share for a technology revolution that put more computing power within the reach of more programmers. But it is surely significant.

In the face of today’s open-source software movement it is hard to remember that, in his day, Bill Gates stormed the barricades in the name of egalitarian computing, sort of. What do you think? Let us know.

The Mono team has been working on its version of Sytem.Windows.Forms for almost four years. And it has hit the finish line. There were 6,434 commits along the way. What’s next? Bug fixing! Twas ever thus!