I have been blown away by the interest in Axum from people I talk with here at PDC. In more than every other conversation I have had, it comes up, and not because I bring it up. We know that the download stats are fantastic for it, but it’s awesome to...

Two days ago I lied. I said I was going to post every day, but Monday was so uneventful that there simply wasn’t anything to say. I helped set up the booths and went back to the hotel… Yawn! Tuesday was more interesting. We had a couple of parallelism...

This year’s PDC promises to be an exciting one with VS 2010 in Beta2 and lots of other technologies either just shipped or about to ship. I’m in Los Angeles to speak about Axum, as part of a new thing we’re doing this year: talking about topics that are...

In my last post, I was looking for someone to tell me about a race condition in the cancel() code path, but to my embarrassment, Krishnan Varadarajan, one of the many talented developers on the ConcRT team, pointed out a bad race on the run/wait code...

No one can accuse me of spamming the MSDN blog site with too many posts, but after months of writing nothing, I recently and suddenly felt inspired to get something posted again. Maybe it had something to do with the release of Beta 2 of VS 2010 and ...

My fellow programming language enthusiast Matthew Podwysocki just posted another F#-based actor sample in his blog; it is a simulation of an auction that was first written in Scala. Last time , I followed his Axum Ping-Pong example with my own F#-based...

It’s been a while since I posted anything here, mainly because we’ve been busy on the Axum team blog over the last few weeks and months. Inspired by this post by Matthew Podwysocki, I thought it would be interesting to show actors in F#, which are closely...

In my last post, I lamented that there was no Maestro-specific blog, but no sooner had I spoken… Josh Phillips got us set up with something specific to Maestro , where we’ll be posting most things related to this incubation effort.

As noted in the Dr Dobb's article , Maestro is primarily about establishing isolation domains so that we can cut down on the number of undocumented dependencies between components. With a language like C# or VB, any two references of type T could be referring...

I had expected that the first word on Maestro would come on this blog, but that's what happens when you take time between posts. We first discussed it during PDC at the Thursday panel on parallel programming, we discussed it on Channel 9 , and then...

At PDC 2008, we talked a lot about agents-based programming, in particular during the native C++ talks on parallel programming. We showed how the agents library that we plan to ship in VS 2010 can be used to overlap I/O with computationally intensive...

If anyone is interested, I just found the Channel 9 link to my Wednesday talk on the Concurrency Runtime. As I said earlier, the topic is a deep dive, so it's rather dry... http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL22/

The symposium panel Thursday went off pretty well. A much smaller crowd than at the other talks, but it was late in the program and people were starting heading home. It's not easy to compete with lunch, either. Not a lot of controversy on the panel...

I did my first talk Wednesday, "A Deep Dive Into the Concurrency Runtime," where I talked about how to extend the PPL and Agents native libraries and how to build your own scheduler with our runtime. A rather dry topic, I almost managed to bore myself...

It's been a long time since I last attended PDC, but now it's in full swing. Last night, I met with a group of customers and partners from Sweden and gave an impromptu presentation about manycore futures. Sweden is not a big country, but it seems the...

Next week is PDC 2008. Presentations are done, demos are being rehearsed, and I'm excited to go to my first PDC in 15 years. Last time, I worked for a partner, not for Microsoft. Anyway, my presentation "Deep Dive into the Concurrency Runtime' is Wednesday...

With the news about Intel's support for our concurrency runtime and my post about it yesterday, some may wonder how it relates to the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR), published as part of the MS Robotics' development kit. The CCR, which...

Intel just disclosed that they intend to support the runtime that our team is working on here at Microsoft, the Concurrency Runtime. Now that the news is out, it seems useful to provide at least two cents' worth of our perspective on what the runtime...

Last night, I realized that in my last post on messages, I skipped over one of the essential characters of message-passing APIs: that they separate the code that produces data from the code that acts on its availability with some level(s) of indirection...

If you haven't taken a serious look at F# yet, you should. This OCaml-inspired language is a great combination of OO and functional programming concepts and will challenge your thinking about how software could (and should) be built. Functional programming...

As should be clear from the previus post, I'm not a big fan of the threads + locks model. An alternative approach is the one offered by message-passing, which is used every day in distributed applications and with enormous success. The world-wide web...

For the next couple of posts, I will turn this blog into a message-passing soap-box. If you read my earlier posts, you know that I think the current mainstream methodologies for reasoning about concurrent applications have some issues, to be diplomatic...

Coinciding with the CTP release of Parallel Extensions to .NET, MSDN just opened a developer center site for Parallel Computing topics. Of course, you're more likely to have found that than this blog, but in case some reader was unaware of it, take a...

Lots of things have been written on concurrency since the 80s when Tony Hoare's book on Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) was published, and the state of the art has advanced since then, but I still find it a great book to go back to every now...

I was very happy to find Edward Lee's excellent talk on the problem(s) with threads available online. The lecture was given at Microsoft Research in January this year, but I haven't found it available outside MS before. If you care at all about understanding...