dumky

The conversation is kind of longwinded and rather dull. Video is too long. Quit halfway...

I like these shorter videos with a faster pace. Some recent videos on Rx with Erik, Brian, etc. were too long and diluted for my taste. Thanks!

This seems to be an implementation of trampoline-style threading in .Net.

You write your code as a method which periodically gives up control of its calling thread by use of the "yield" statement. And you expect that the scheduler/engine will revive you so that you can continue from where you left off.

 

This same technique can be used to write multi-threaded programs in single-thread languages such as javascript:  http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000315.html

 

This technique would benefit from C# supporting the "yield foreach" construction. This would allow for an iterator method calling into another iterator method passing the result directly through. This is an especially useful syntax and optimization for recusive calls (tree navigation).

Read more on "yield foreach" at http://blogs.msdn.com/wesdyer/archive/2007/03/23/all-about-iterators.aspx

Good stuff guys.

I especially like the intro tutorial http://visitmix.com/labs/gestalt/getstarted/

Very clear and to the point.

 

That said, you mentioned one of the problems with HTML+JS, which is the relative weakness of the IDEs and debugging tools. It seems that Gestalt makes things even harder to debug.

Good technical presentation. It would be good to explain how this solution makes developers more productive than other parser generators however. Also, how are MGrammar and MSchema better together?

Also, I was incidentally looking at a cool web tool which uses a DSL to generate UML diagrams (http://www.websequencediagrams.com/). Digging some more into it, I found out language specs for UML (such as http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/studygroups/com10/languages/Z.120_1199.pdf) and that made it clear that any DSL language needs to be very well speced and documented. The presentation didn't demonstrate those aspects.

The guys in this videos have the smile of a cat who just ate the goldfish.

They are basically sneaking an ad-blocker into IE, under guise of privacy.
Just like AdBlock Plus, they don't take the responsibility of which urls get blocked, they let people publish filtersets (Subscriptions).
Ad blocking has not been a huge concern for the industry so far, because it is not that mainstream. But having it built into IE8 would make that possible.
Ad networks and web analytics providers are going to love this one.

This is not a new issue (http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000230.html), but it continues growing in momentum...

How much parallelism and optimization can be done by the compiler automatically?
Daan points out that even with code with no side-effect, the question of the overhead remains.
I think this can be solved by an approach like PGO (Profile Guided Optimization). In other words, run the program with some instrumentation to try out the different parameters and see what benefits they bring, then re-compile the program with those decisions and optimizations built-in.

Can the Ink Serialization Format (for Tablet PC) be opened too?

Remote programming is a great addition. It seems that it is still quite limited though, as it seems geared towards personal use more than social use.
We need to unique urls for shows (the same way that IMDB urls can be used to identify movies), so they can be exchanged in email or webpages, in addition to getting recorded remotely...

This application looks quite nifty, but it's hardly Tablet PC specific (although it works well on one). He could be using a mouse all the same...