Comments

I believe that most developers, who has done any parallel programming, would agree that there is a (big) difference between sequential programming and parallel programming and I personally think that developers should recognice this difference. (I think of it kind of like the shift from procedural programming to object oriented programming) If they don't recognice the difference, I fear that developers might be misguided and in the end have a harder time understanding why certain problems occur.

Say for example when they do a parallel foreach with an ordered result as default and the performance sucks big time.... If instead the framework defaults to, what I believe is natural for parallel, an unordered result, then they will be forced to think about if they really need ordered results or not, and if they are ready to pay the performance penalty.

That said, I'm not against making the transition from sequential to parallel programming easier by obscuring the fact that you are developing parallel code, as long as it isn't also hiding serious issues which should be thought about.

In the end It depends on which goal you are trying to reach, ease of use vs. performance (in this case)... I think you should favor performance in a parallel framework.

PS: I just got home from a party and is still kinda drunk so please disregard any nonsense in this message

My first post was supposed to say:

My 2 cents on the "ordered vs. unordered output default", issue...

At some point somebody mentioned that you might want to make the default ordered because that is what developers expect. I think that is wrong... Only developers who are used to sequential processing will expect the order of the output to be the same as the input.

In an asynchronous/parallel world the natural order of the output is unordered, so I really think you should stick with that as the default. Old school developers have to realize that they can't depend on the order unless they explicitly want to do the extra work of sorting the output.

So just to reiterate... The unordered output is the natural output in an parallel world. What do you think?

Kind regards,
Johannes

But now it's chinese or something... Whats up with the comment system? It seems like another post or something. Oh and when I edit it my original text show up just fine. It seems like the first comment on a video has some problems... Suresh's comment on part 1 of this video is also acting strangly... Charles?

Was blank the first time I saw the comment too, but now it shows up fine... An Edit perhaps?

Edit: Nope he didn't edit it... Now it's blank again?

My 2 cents on the "ordered vs. unordered output default", issue...

At some point somebody mentioned that you might want to make the default ordered because that is what developers expect. I think that is wrong... Only developers who are used to sequential processing will expect the order of the output to be the same as the input.

In an asynchronous/parallel world the natural order of the output is unordered, so I really think you should stick with that as the default. Old school developers have to realize that they can't depend on the order unless they explicitly want to do the extra work of sorting the output.

So just to reiterate... The unordered output is the natural output in an parallel world. What do you think?

Kind regards,
Johannes

Bas wrote:

The UI suffered a bit performance wise over here. Maybe that's because it's just an alpha, I don't know. But when clicking the 'play' button in the creator, the game's performance is terrible even though the tick counter is at 30ms or something. When I just play the game outside the editor (like when clicking the link above), performance is just fine, though. I assume this is due to all sorts of diagnostics stuff bringing performance down, but it could use some work.

I think performance problems are mainly caused by silverlight 1.1. I expect this to get "a lot" better when silverlight 2.0 get released.

This is a very interesting video, I'm surprised it hasn't spawned more comments. I feel the 2 most important "unanswered" questions/issues raised were the "IDE" and the "ease of messing up your code" ones.

I agree that there seems to be a dynamic revolution going on right now and that it would be stupid not to follow the development of the dynamic languages closely. So static-type developers keep you minds open to this development.

Given the content of the videos I've seen so far from JAOO I'm very sorry I couldn't come to the conference. I'm definately gonna go next year. Can't wait!

Rory. Man, you really need to start shaking hands. Its exactly because you don't that you get the cold. Let me put it in MS terms.

See, your immune system is sorta like Windows Live OneCare and it needs to be updated once in a while to keep the virus definitions up to date (i.e. get as many virus samples for your immune system to train on... especially new, updated vira). If you don't use the automatic update in windows your computer would be left wide open for anyone who'd like to get access. Just like your body is now open for all sorts of exploitation... :O

Ehh, wait. That last part didn't sound right... Well, you get the point.

So just go out and jump in an unclean pool... Sniff your fingers after poo poo, and sleep in a reactor core once in a while... It's all REALLY good for you!

Nah, I really like your interviewing style and your vids in general... Keep'em coming and keep up the good work!

Nice job guys! Especially considering Expression is a line of "1st" generation products!

However, and I know this is not really a Expression Design complaint but rather a general complaint, the performance seems awfully slow compared to competeing products such as flash. Notice the framerate drop in the demo when the "complex" camera vector drawing was dropped into the slider control? Also, the designer seems to redraw the vector art somewhat slowly. Unfotunately this performance is consistent with my own tests which are showing very poor performance on WinXP SP2 using .Net 3.0 RTM. Ok, so I admit I'm only using Vista RC2 (with a beta nvidia driver) for my Vista tests and even then it is showing much better performance than XP... However, still not great performance.

Also, I don't expect the performance to improve when you start hosting WPF within a browser so I really hope you are targeting this issue in future releases. Any comments from MS on this?

I don't want to give the impression that I don't like the "Window X Foundation" + "Expression X" initiative because I think it's a great advance in application development seen from a overall application production workflow perspective. And the feature set is extremely powerful and advanced compared to any other product. I just hope you don't get caught up only trying to add more features instead of doing some grunt work on the more basic features such as performance.

I almost can't wait to follow the evolution of application development in the next few years. MS truly made christmas come early for me with the release of Vista and .NET 3.0, thank you!

Kind regards,
Johannes Hansen

First in danish:
Fedt! Endelig en ny dansk nørd på Channel 9 ud over Mr. Hejlsberg. Godt gået Claus!

And for you non-danes here's an english translation:
Cool! Finally a new danish geek on Channel 9 besides Mr. Hejlsberg.  Nicely done Claus!

Go denmark!

Very nice video! As you guys mentioned earlier the whiteboard explanation really puts the idea of linq into perspective.