DEV307 - Parallel computing for managed developers
Until a few years ago computers were equipped with single core computers and the processing power of that single core would grow every year. Nowadays the computer power is still growing but not by making the single core faster, but by adding more cores to a computer. For programmers that means that if you want to leverage the true power of a computer you will have to change the way you write your applications.
You will have to parallelize your software where you can but it hasn't been easy.
As you can see in the
example in the manual parallel solution. The are a lot of threading issues to take in account.
PLinq to the rescue! As you can see the in the PLinq example you are back focusing on the business value and not the concurrency side of programming. Besides PLinq the new parallel library offers a first class citizen programming model for parallel programming. When programming in tasks you get a more think in “Unit-of-Work”way of working instead of “Paths of execution” when working with Threads. What I found very cool is the support for parallelism in the tooling. VS2010 offers a separate window to view tasks and to selectively freeze the execution of tasks, which makes debugging a lot easier.
DEV301 - Architecting Microsoft Silverlight applications with MVVM
Very good session on Silverlight, RIA services and combining them in with the Model View ViewModel pattern to get a good separation of concerns. Shwan Wildermuth part of the Silverlight promo team gave us a begin to end demo of building a small application, without the use of resharper or code snippets, showing of his xaml ninja skills.
ARC309 – Patterns for cloud computing
Having visited other sessions on cloud computing I still hadn’t had a clear overview to cloud computing, until this session. Simon Guest had setup his presentation in such a way it encapsulated a lot of questions I had, giving me clear answer. In essence he described the five mayor ways cloud computing can be utilized.
Using the Cloud for Scale
Using the Cloud for Multi Tenancy
Using the Cloud for Compute
Using the Cloud for Storage
Using the Cloud for Communications
Teched 2009 – Summary
Well It been a busy week, lot of walking around in the beautiful city of Berlin and even though it’s a week ago that Teched 2009 ended my head still hurts on the information overload! First of I would like to thank my TechEd buddies Marko Mansi, Justin van Beijeren and Bastiaan Wout for keeping me company this week. Our conversations and discussions during the day and especially during the evenings were a great way to put things in perspective.
This years TechEd was different compared to last years, there where some pro’s and con’s which I like to summarize.
The food was great and the German punktlichheit was a very big improvement over last years Spanish mañana.,mañana. The venue however could have been put to better use, lots of stairs to go up and down not to mention when you wanted a drink you had to go back to the exhibitors hall (which partly changed during the week, so feedback works!). The content of the sessions was just like last year’s, excellent! This year’s TechEd also combined IT Pro and Developers, something I was skeptical about before hand. My skepticism was proven warranted, many sessions where only given once and many of the sessions were full. Which left a lot of TechEd attendee pissed of, I witnessed a couple of heated discussions between the TechEd people and attendees wanting to attend a session. I stood in front of three of those closed doors and none of those sessions were repeated :-(. Luckily I can view most of the sessions online. But I hope that next years TechEd is better organized.
I also would like to thank the organizers of this year’s Dutch country drink, it was awesome! And a special thanks to our waiter at club Dante for recommending Block House restaurant, very very very very good quality meat!
I also recommend to visit Berlin for a city trip, the city’s architecture and culture are great! This year mark the 20th year anniversary of the fall of the Berliner wall, which was celebrated and we were happy to party along with our German neighbors! That a for me about this years TechEd, until next time!
