Isolation, Agents, and Message-passing in .NET

Those who have followed this blog will have noticed that it’s been a long time since we posted anything new about Axum, and the time has come to state publicly that which may have been clear to some but not others, that we’re not currently pursuing productization...

The feedback we’ve received from our fans has been incredibly useful in shaping our approach to agent-based programming, safety and parallelism in general. It continues to play a role in our thinking about the next version of Visual Studio – known here...

Thus quipped the great writer Mark Twain after a newspaper supposedly prematurely published his obituary, and it seems oddly relevant to Axum right now. In this post on the Axum Forum, an Axum fan asks whether the language effort is dead or not. Let me...

Going to PDC this year?  We are too! Niklas Gustafsson, the Principal Architect on Axum (and some other jewels like the Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework and the Concurrency Runtime ) will be giving a talk on Axum in the Innovation Track...

Jebu Ittiachen and Arun Suresh of Yahoo! have written an interesting article for Dr. Dobbs about a prototype they’ve built for Yahoo! Harvester using Erlang. The performance gains they achieved are quite impressive. Some of the more interesting highlights...

Our friend Matt Podwysocki posted a very fascinating look at why Axum and F# might make a happy marriage and what that coupling could look like .  We encourage you to take a look and post your comments! Great stuff – thanks Matt! The Axum Team

Hello Axumites! It’s been a while since we’ve last talked but many of you have silently been downloading the bits and surely some of you have actually been using them.  As we get further along in our prototyping/planning efforts we want to know how...

Update:  The survey is now closed.  Thanks to all that participated! Axumites,   We’ve heard our customers’ frustrations with asynchronous programming and their call for improved support.  We are hoping to better understand why and...

Are you excited? We thought so. We’ve been listening to some of your pain points with Axum 0.1.0 and went straight to the kitchen to cook up 0.2.0 - now available for your code-slingin’ pleasure. We’ve fixed quite a few bugs and made some overall improvements...

It’s been two weeks since we released the CTP on DevLabs . Thousands of people have downloaded it, tried it out, and many have sent us their feedback – thanks for all your input! In the coming weeks we will be releasing a new build that will contain some...

This article is in response to some great commentary from someone writing under the screen name “sylvan” over on the Channel 9 site : This is pretty cool, but I think the semantics are overly complicated. I couldn't say that I know of a better way of...

It gives me great pleasure to announce the availability of our Axum technology preview at the MSDN DevLabs site . I have been working on this project off and on for several years, and for the last 18 months or so, I’ve had good company from Artur Laksberg...

The subject of immutability sparks intense interest among the people who follow our blog, as is evident from the comments to the recent post by Niklas. Naturally, inside our team, a lot of thinking goes into making parallelism safe, and the ideas about...

We rarely speak of parallelism when discussing Axum, because you very rarely think about it when designing or writing an Axum application. Instead, you write a bunch of components which are all single-threaded and have them send messages to each other...

Axum has a couple of storage modifiers not found in most other languages (although several languages incorporate futures and / or promises, similar concepts). Axum has three modifiers that are useful mostly with concurrent algorithms, for synchronization...

Note: a variant of this text also appears in the Axum Programmer’s Guide, which will be distributed with the upcoming CTP. Axum has great support for writing distributed applications. In fact, one of the reasons for taking such a hard line on isolation...

One of the problems in asynchronous message passing is preventing a situation where a sender produces messages faster than a receiver can handle them. Consider this piece of Axum code: foreach(var price in GetNextStockPrice()) { report::Price <...

When we talk about Axum as a programming language, we make the point that it is not an object-oriented language, but that it is still object-aware. What do we mean by this, and is it really true that you cannot define objects with Axum? What we mean is...

Greetings from the Axum Team! If you thought that this is one of those blogs that fizzles out after the initial sparkle of activity, rest assured we’re still alive and well. In fact, we’re forging ahead full steam towards our first preview release...

You might’ve noticed that the title of our blog has changed as well as some mysterious disclaimers at the beginning of each of our blogs posts. Yes, it’s true, we’ve changed our name from ‘Maestro’ to codename ‘Axum’. Fret not! Axum is the same project...

Disclaimer:  The Maestro project has been renamed.  While referred to in this article as ‘Maestro’, moving forward the project is referred to with codename ‘Axum’. Given a programming model such as Maestro, where components are strictly isolated...

Disclaimer:  The Maestro project has been renamed.  While referred to in this article as ‘Maestro’, moving forward the project is referred to with codename ‘Axum’. The way you perform an operation in a typical imperative programming language...

Disclaimer:  The Maestro project has been renamed.  While referred to in this article as ‘Maestro’, moving forward the project is referred to with codename ‘Axum’. Copied from 'Concurrently Speaking'   As noted in the Dr Dobb's article...

Disclaimer: The Maestro project has been renamed. While referred to in this article as ‘Maestro’, moving forward the project is referred to with codename ‘Axum’. Copied from 'Parallel Programming with .NET' When discussing parallel computing and...