Programming

While many people think of 3D applications as primarily being games, 3D graphics also bring educational apps to life.  Roberto Sonnino, developer of the Visual Studio 3D Starter Kit, interviews Gokhan Sengun of Netas Telekomunikasyon A.S., who created the Virtual Experiment Laboratory…

Code Digger is a lightweight version of Pex that allows you to explore public .NET methods in Portable Libraries directly from the Visual Studio 2012 code editor. It's a highly simplified and nifty way to leverage the power of Pex and Z3, one of the…

Immutable Collections are a new set of immutable types for .NET. We covered the high level aspects of this new technology a few months back when Erik Meijer interrogated (in his friendly way) the PM of the project, Immo Landwerth, and the lead developer, Andrew Arnott. Since this…

This module goes over the differences between Object Oriented Programming (OOP), Managed Languages and why use C# for OOP. It also addresses the evolution of C# and what you can expect with the latest version. [09:27] - Object Oriented Programming [14:45] - What is a Managed Language? [23:47] - Why…

Async involves some new concepts. They're not difficult; just unfamiliar. Over the past year Lucian Wischik has been watching how people use async/await in C# and VB. This series distils out the three top async patterns and anti-patterns. Tips: Async void is for top-level event-handlers only, and…

Async Tip #1: Async void is for top-level event-handlers only, and event-like things. Don't use it elsewhere in your code. Slides are available on Lucian's blog. Async void is a "fire-and-forget" mechanism: the caller is unable to know when an async void has finished, and the…

Async Tip #2: It's crucial to distinguish CPU-bound work (should be done on threadpool) from IO-bound work (which needn't). You can download slides for this talk from Lucian's blog. I remember reading an old Android dev blog post. It said: "1. A good practice in creating responsive…

Async Tip #3: You can wrap events up in Task-returning APIs and await them. This can dramatically simplify code. Slides and source code are available on Lucian's blog. This video introduces a new pattern for dealing with events: you can await them! Now why would you want to do that? Well,…

Tomas Petricek, a PhD student at University of Cambridge focusing on programming models, teaches us about one of his favorite programming languages, F#. The main topic is programming data with F#. You'll learn about Type Providers and Tomas will show how you can easily call REST APIs from F# using…

Image Watch is a new Visual Studio 2012 plug-in for debugging C++ image and video processing applications, for example photo or augmented reality apps. Image Watch provides a watch window that can display in-memory bitmaps during debugging, so you no longer need to litter your code with…