Technical Program (HTML, PDF)

Keynote :
Thinking outside the Bento Box

The existing user experience of integrated development environments has proved useful for over twenty years. While it successfully integrates programming tools into a single experience, it also partitions the information the programmer needs into many tiny compartments, like a bento box. In this talk, I’ll describe several projects at Microsoft Research that rethink this user experience. Code Canvas provides a zoomable map of a software project, allowing the programmer to zoom out to see structure and visualizations and zoom in to edit code. Debugger Canvas (a joint project with Brown University) provides a spatial representation of a programmer’s task, like a debugging session, as it unfolds. Code Space uses a combination of touch screens, Kinects and mobile devices to allow fluid sharing of digital objects at development team meetings. Finally, Touch Develop is a touch-based development environment that allows a consumer to program a smart phone on the phone itself.

Bio: Rob DeLine is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, working at the intersection of software engineering and human-computer interaction. His research group designs development tools in a user-centered fashion: they conduct studies of development teams to understand their work practice and prototype tools to improve that practice. Rob has a background in both HCI and software engineering. His master's thesis was the first version of the Alice programming environment (University of Virginia, 1993), and his PhD was in software architecture (Carnegie Mellon University, 1999).