Microsoft Research Webinar Series

Better design, implementation, and testing of async systems with Coyote

Software is becoming increasingly more distributed, making asynchronous programming the norm, yet programming languages and tools have been slow to provide the help needed to really address all the complexities that arise when building reliable async software. The Coyote project is a new open-source library from Microsoft Research designed to help developers solve challenging problems with concurrency and non-determinism in their code. Coyote also provides an advanced testing tool capable of quickly and systematically testing your code to automatically identify bugs, including safety and liveness violations. In addition, these bugs can be reproduced using Coyote’s replay capability, making it easy to debug a system.

In this webinar, Chris Lovett, Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft Research, will introduce Coyote and demonstrate how it can help developers write correct async code with confidence. To convey this complicated subject in a practical way, this webinar will walk you through Coyote sample code and show you how to test and visualize that code with the powerful Coyote testing tool. Lovett will also discuss how Coyote is being used by Microsoft Azure today.

Together, you’ll explore:

The causes of complexity in async code, including sources of non-determinism

Tackling this complexity using Coyote and its testing tool

Coyote’s two programming models—the asynchronous tasks programming model and the more advanced asynchronous actors programming model

Sample code in C#

Chris Lovett is a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft Research. He’s worked at Microsoft for 23 years, contributing to many key products, including Windows, SQL Server, .NET Frameworks, and Visual Studio, and various incubation groups. Lovett, a co-inventor on 16 patents, has written millions of lines of code and loves starting and growing new projects on small fast-paced incubation teams into successful products. He’s done this several times in his career, including with a startup company he sold to Microsoft.

*This on-demand webinar features a previously recorded Q&A session and open captioning.