An Archived Managed World

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Series

Tour de BCL 4.0

An Archived Managed World This blog has moved to http://www.managed-world.com/blog

Dec 09

This blog has moved

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If you are subscribed to my RSS feed, you shouldn't see this as FeedBurner should have redirected you automatically. This blog has moved to http://www.managed-world.com/blog. This site is now for archive purposes. Thanks!

Posted On Saturday, December 19, 2009 5:46 AM

Oct 09

Visual Studio 2010 Training Course on Channel 9

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This morning, Channel 9 launched the new Channel 9 Learning Center. From Channel 9, here’s a description of what the Learning Center is: “The Channel 9 Learning Center is the destination for free technical training on emerging Microsoft products and technologies. The Learning Center consists of a set of courses with each course including a set of videos, ......

Posted On Wednesday, October 21, 2009 5:08 AM C# Dev Center , Development

Oct 09

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Training Kit Published

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The Beta 2 version of DPE’s Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit is now live (you can find it at http://tinyurl.com/Beta2Tra... A training kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize a variety of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 technologies. The Beta 2 release of the Training ......

Posted On Tuesday, October 20, 2009 5:54 AM C# Dev Center , Development

Jul 09

10-4 Episode 26: Creating Extensible Apps with MEF

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In this episode of 10-4, we take a look at a new library in .NET Framework 4 and how it helps developers write applications that are more extensible and easier to maintain than before. For more information on the Managed Extensibility Framework, make sure to check out its home on Codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/mef. For more 10-4 episodes, be sure ......

Posted On Monday, July 13, 2009 4:17 PM C# Dev Center , Development

Jun 09

Parallel Computing with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1

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One of the big areas of improvements coming to Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 is in the area parallel computing. There are a LOT of new features and improvements to existing features here with this latest release of our developer tools. Many people smarter and more capable than I have already written about most of this stuff, so there’s not ......

Posted On Tuesday, June 9, 2009 6:44 PM Concurrency , Development

Apr 09

F# Basics – Infix Operators

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As I’ve been writing more F# code and learning more about the F# language, I have found myself intrigued by how some surprisingly simple language features can combine with each other to enable us to write very expressive code. While I am still learning F# (and realize just how much more I have to learn), I’m hoping that sharing some of these thoughts ......

Posted On Friday, April 17, 2009 10:03 PM Functional Programming , Development

Feb 09

An Intro to Barrier, cont.d

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Well, I said I was going to be moving on to CountdownEvent, but I was wrong. there is one more aspect of using Barrier that I just had to share (thanks go to Stephen Toub on the Parallel Computing Platform team for bringing this up). In my first Barrier post, I had mentioned: Barrier is a great new synchronization primitive to use when there is a known ......

Posted On Tuesday, February 24, 2009 10:42 AM C# Dev Center , Concurrency , Development

Feb 09

Tour de BCL 4.0

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Over the coming months, I would like to take you on a whirlwind tour of a bunch of the new data structures and APIs being added to the Base Class Libraries (BCL) for .NET Framework 4.0. This will take us everywhere from new multithreading-oriented data structures like Barrier and CountdownEvent, to more basic structures like Tuple. I’ll update this ......

Posted On Monday, February 9, 2009 11:40 PM Development

An Intro to Barrier

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In this first stage of our Tour de BCL, we will be passing through the new Barrier class. So what is a Barrier? Let’s take a look at the boring technical description for a Barrier: A Barrier is a synchronization primitive that enforces the stopping of execution between a number of threads or processes at a given point and prevents further execution ......

Posted On Monday, February 9, 2009 11:17 PM C# Dev Center , Concurrency , Development

Jan 09

A work in progress

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Here's a sneak peek at a project/library I'm currently working on: include Microsoft::Xna::Framework include Microsoft::Xna::Framework::... include RubyXna class FluxxGame < RubyXnaGame def initialize self.background_color = Color.black end def load(loader) @font = loader.load_font("Title") end def render(renderer) renderer.draw_text(@font, ......

Posted On Sunday, January 4, 2009 4:06 PM Game Development

Dec 08

10-4 Episode 2: Welcome to Visual Studio 2010

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Happy Holidays, everybody! First of all, thanks to everybody who helped get the word out on the launch of this new show on Channel 9 by blogging, tweeting, or spreading the word using other ways. There is no doubt in our minds that the launch of this new show wouldn’t have been nearly as successful without all of you! In this second episode of 10-4, ......

Posted On Wednesday, December 24, 2008 2:34 PM Development

Dec 08

On the potential abuse of the var keyword

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This question/conversation has come up quite often when chatting with friends and other developers. With the introduction of the "var" keyword in C# now, when should it be used (and, perhaps more importantly, when should it not be used). Here is a quick summary on my thoughts... My personal feeling is that it's a problem if I have to rely on Intellisense ......

Posted On Sunday, December 14, 2008 12:56 PM C# Dev Center , Development

Oct 08

Steven Sinofsky, Senior VP of Windows, in Open Space

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Great news everybody! I just got word that Day 2 of the PDC (that's Tuesday), at 12:45pm, Steven Sinofsky will be giving a 30 minute Open Space session on "Windows 7 Keynote Discussion." Yes, that's correct. The Senior Vice President of Windows and Windows Live will be in Open Space at 12:45pm to discuss with you, our customers, what you think about ......

Posted On Tuesday, October 28, 2008 1:38 AM Events

Oct 08

SmallBasic is here!

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I'm VERY excited to finally talk about this publicly. A while ago, I was able to start playing around with a programming language called SmallBasic being developed internally at Microsoft by Vijaye Raji. And now, it's finally been announced as part of our new Dev Labs effort. So what is SmallBasic? From the website: "Small Basic is a project that's ......

Posted On Thursday, October 23, 2008 11:26 PM Development

Oct 08

PDC 2008 - Open Space Details

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I've announced previously about the inclusion of Open Space at PDC 2008 this year. I'm here to let you know some of the details of how Open Space will work at PDC and how anybody at PDC can participate. Believe it or not, Open Space is going to be open anytime there are sessions going on at PDC. The first thing you need to know about is how you can ......

Posted On Thursday, October 16, 2008 6:57 AM Events

Sep 08

Threading Basics: Race Conditions, Part 1

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I've talked in the past about the importance of parallel computing for all us developers. It's a trend in computer software and hardware architecture that is not a fad. Currently, in the US, it is nearly impossible to buy a new computer that has only a single core. We're even starting to see some of the first quad-core laptops hit the market. It's becoming ......

Posted On Thursday, September 18, 2008 8:13 PM C# Dev Center , Concurrency , Development

Jul 08

Great posts on F# and the power of Function Composition

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If you want to see real F# programming showing off the power of function composition, I found some great blog posts earlier tonight. They are actually by Dustin Campbell on his blog: http://diditwith.net/Catego... I think these posts are some of the best F# posts I have seen out there so far. I love them because they ......

Posted On Wednesday, July 30, 2008 5:15 AM Functional Programming

Jul 08

Building A Fluent Interface for MEF

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How would you like to use the following way to configure dependencies in MEF? A fluent interface with POCO support (no attributes necessary)? Yup. var resolver = new FluentResolver(); resolver.Register<HelloW... And<HelloGreeting>().... And<ConsoleOutputter>... var domain = new CompositionContainer(resolv... ......

Posted On Friday, July 4, 2008 9:59 PM C# Dev Center , Development

Jun 08

True CCR Concurrency - Using CCR without Iterators

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As developers get up to speed with the CCR, they quickly come across the (ab)use of iterators to achieve "concurrency." Okay, "(ab)use" may have been a bit of a low-blow. I call it an abuse as it is a totally unorthodox use of what iterators are usually used for, and I've came across my fair share of developers who find this unorthodox usage highly ......

Posted On Saturday, June 21, 2008 7:22 AM Concurrency , Development

Jun 08

Avoiding Inheritance Dependencies Using Generics and Lambdas

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One realization I have come to when talking with many other developers is that there is a good number of developers that don't realize that inheritance introduces dependencies directly into your classes. Your derived class is now dependant upon the interface and behavior of your base class. Worded another way, your derived class is now strongly coupled ......

Posted On Sunday, June 15, 2008 1:18 AM Development

Jun 08

Lambdas - Know Your Closures

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In this post I want to discuss with you the importance of realizing how lambdas work (and why you should care). Let's dive right in with some code. Given the following code snippet, what would you expect the output to be (no cheating :P)? var actions = new List<Action>(); for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { actions.Add(() => Console.WriteLine(i)); ......

Posted On Friday, June 13, 2008 6:28 AM Development

Jun 08

Open Space At PDC 2008!

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This year for PDC 2008, we have decided to learn from a successful model used by various customers (like the ALT.NET crowd) in order to help ensure that PDC 2008 is the best conference ever. Our goal with these un-sessions is to really enable attendees with common interests to have some great conversations in an efficient setting. So what is Open Space? ......

Posted On Tuesday, June 10, 2008 6:49 AM Events

Jun 08

Managed Extensibility Framework CTP Released

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What a great week to be a developer. First, the latest Parallel Extensions CTP was released to the net, and now the first Managed Extensibility Framework CTP has been released onto Code Gallery. So what is the Managed Extensibility Framework? From the announcement: "The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) provides developers with a tool to easily ......

Posted On Thursday, June 5, 2008 5:22 AM Development

Jun 08

Facet Mapping with LINQ, Part 2

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In "Facet Mapping with LINQ, Part 1", we discussed how to add Facet Mapping to your .NET application using an attribute-based solution. This solution just doesn't leave me very excited. As we recounted, there are some problems with using an attribute-based approach: Littering domain models with presentation layer-specific attributes Doesn't support ......

Posted On Tuesday, June 3, 2008 9:00 PM Development

Jun 08

Fluent Languages

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The first time I saw some talk about this "movement", it was Martin Fowler discussing "Fluent Interfaces". An example Martin gives is the idea of time intervals. Here's how one might declare an interval today (in Java): TimePoint fiveOClock, sixOClock; ... TimeInterval meetingTime = new TimeInterval(fiveOClock, sixOClock); Here's how one might to do ......

Posted On Monday, June 2, 2008 11:16 PM Development