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If you're interested in learning more about the products or solutions discussed in this episode, click on any of the below links for free, in-depth information:

Websites:

• Getting started with Windows 8 Apps
• How to Sell Your Apps and Make Money in the Windows Store
• Attend a Windows 8 Developer Camp and Hackathon in your area!

Blogs & Articles:

• Jerry Nixon’s Blog
• Learn more about Reactive Extensions
• Introduction to Rx

Videos:

• Microsoft DevRadio: Managing Your Windows 8 Enterprise Apps with Windows Intune
• Microsoft DevRadio: Your Top Windows Store Questions Answered

Virtual Labs:

• Windows 8 Virtual Labs

Framework soup

Over the last months I’ve spent quite some time checking out the Kinect for Windows SDK and it’s really fun to work with this awesome little piece of hard and software.

While playing around with the Kinect for Windows SDK it soon became obvious that I’ll need some sort of framework that handles all the tough event handling stuff for me. That's were the ReactiveExtensions framework came into play. Since I’ve first read about it I wanted to use it somewhere but didn’t get the chance so far. Now that the Kinect came around the corner with its event driven API Rx fitted perfectly to my requirements.

Another framework that impressed me a lot is SignalR, an abstraction layer for persistent connections over http.

So how do they all come together? In an application I called ‘KickerNotifier‘!
We have a ‘Kicker’ (that's german, in english foosball/tabletop football/tabletop soccer) to play with in the cellar of our office.

Problem is that the table stands in the cellar and you never know whether it is busy.

So the idea is the following: Set up a Kinect that is able to track the number of people in the room and push the amount to a website so that all the colleagues are able to see how many people are playing.

The technology stack

...

Project Information URL: http://passiondev.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/framework-soup/

Contact Information:

• Blog: http://passiondev.wordpress.com
• Twitter: @MarcusKohnert

Jafar has always been a big fan of Rx (including his days at Microsoft), ever since he first learned about it by watching a C9 video with Erik Meijer and Brian Beckman geeking out on the math and theory behind Rx. Netflix is literally powered by Rx.  Jafar really gets Rx. If you're struggling to wrap your head around it, even at the conceptual level, this conversation should make things crystal clear. Go Rx!

Of course, anytime you talk about Rx and Erik Meijer is roaming around the halls nearby, chances are pretty good that he'll drop into the conversation - literally. Does it happen this time? Will the great Erik Meijer appear? You'll need to watch this interview to find out...

Tune in. Enjoy!

• [0:39] Windows Phone SDK 8.0 Download
• [1:43] What's new in Windows Phone 8 (Justin Angel)
• [3:39] Touring the Windows Phone 8 Dev Center (Todd Brix)
• [3:55] 8 days of Windows Phone 8 (Geert van der Cruijsen)
• [4:15] How many lines of code does it take to build a complete WP8 speech app? (Rob Chambers)
• [5:15] Announcing the release of the .NET Framework for Windows Phone 8 (Brandon Bray)
• [6:39] //build/ Session Highlight: The Evolution of .NET (Brandon Bray)
• [8:26] Windows 8 Design Handbook (Ratio Interactive)
• [9:34] [#WINDOWS8] HowTo: Debugging a app in Win8 ARM with Visual Studio 2012 #VS2012 (Bruno Capuano)
• [11:01] Ten - oh, wait, eleven - Eleven things you should know about the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update (Jon Galloway)
• [12:33] Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2012
• [13:15] Meet IntelliCommand (Visual Studio 2010/2012 extension) (Denis Gladkikh), Helping others become Visual Studio Keyboard Ninja's with the Code Ninja Spy -> CodeNinjaSpy
• [14:32] Using Private Extension Galleries in Visual Studio 2012 (Jakob Ehn)
• [14:59] Reactive Extensions (Rx) is now Open Source (Scott Hanselman)

Picks of the Week!

• Brian's Pick of the Week:[15:50] 31 Days of Windows 8 (Clark Sell, Jeff Blankenburg)
• Mark's Pick of the Week:[17:41] JSON Editor Online

In addition to the usual support for .NET and JS we're very pleased to announce the release of the C++ Rx library! Now, C/C++ developers get to experience the power of LINQ + Rx!! Rock and roll.

Congratulations to the Rx team!!!

• [0:24] Windows 8 RTM is available for developers (Ian LeGrow)
• [1:16] Windows 8 Developer Camp - Redmond, Introducing the Windows 8 platform
• [2:22] Migrating your Release Preview app to Windows 8
• [3:27] Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 released to the web! (Jason Zander)
• [4:31] Visual Studio 2012 Launch Event
• [4:56] Announcing the release of .NET Framework 4.5 RTM - Product and Source Code (Brandon Bray)
• [5:50] Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 is RELEASED - Here's 5 minute videos to get you up to speed quick (Scott Hanselman)
• [7:45] Channel 9 Highlight: Visual Studio 2012 Premium and Ultimate Overview Series (alvinho)
• [9:02] Available Now: Blend for Visual Studio 2012 (Christian Schormann)
• [9:50] Announcing Blend + SketchFlow Preview for Visual Studio 2012 (Erik Arthur)
• [10:36] IntroToRx.com (Lee Campbell), Reactive Extensions v2.0 has arrived!, Bart De Smet Going Deep video 

Picks of the Week!

• Brian's Pick of the Week:[11:27] Announcing git-tf: Combining the local repository of Git with the integrated ALM of TFS And Announcing Kanban for Team Foundation Service
• Dan's Pick of the Week:[14:18] Redefining the Introduction to Computer Science - Khan Academy now does Computer Science, http://www.khanacademy.org/cs (John Resig)

I caught up with Bart at his whiteboard (of course) to discuss the significance of this release as well address some of the great additions to Rx as outlined below (many of the topics below have been discussed in depth in other Rx interviews with Bart.) We also talk about the new experimental build shipping model. Much of the time is spent talking about the portable libraries architecture for Rx for Windows 8, .NET 4.5, WP7/7.5 and beyond. Bart has been very, very busy and as usual his engineering is golden.

Tune in! It's always a pleasure to geek out with Bart. So much to learn. Congratulations to the Rx team!!!

The highlights of Rx 2.0 include:

• Support for building Windows Store apps for Windows 8. This includes primitives to synchronize with the Windows XAML CoreDispatcher and interop with WinRT events and IAsync* objects.
• Support for Portable Class Library projects, allowing code reuse across ".NET Framework 4.5" and ".NET Framework 4.5 for Windows Store apps" projects. We're planning on adding Windows Phone 8 support to this going forward.
• Integration with the new C# 5.0 and VB 11 "async" and "await" features. In Rx v2.0, you can await an observable sequence, allowing one to apply the power of Rx to the new asynchronous programming model.
• Enormous performance improvements, with a 4x speedup of the query pipeline, vastly reduced object allocation rates, massively increased throughput of schedulers, and much more.
• An improved error handling strategy, enabling higher resiliency and proper resource cleanup for queries in the face of user errors at various levels.
• Thorough revisit of the way we deal with time, to improve efficiency and predictability. This includes better support for periodic timers, improvements to absolute time scheduling, etc.
• Various new and improved query operators.

Most of the time is spent at the whiteboard - very comfortable and natural place for Bart!  

Note: there is a lot of time in this interview, both in terms of interview length and the notion of time itself. Use at your own risk and watch out for unexpected wormholes.

More on Rx 2.0 RC:

This new release of Rx includes a number of improvements to the way we deal with time. As you likely know, dealing with time is a complex undertaking in general, especially when computers are involved. Rx has a lot of temporal query operators to perform event processing, and therefore it needs to be able to schedule work to happen at particular times. As a result, notions of time exist in virtually any layer of the system: from the schedulers at the bottom (in System.Reactive.Core) to the query operators at the top (in System.Reactive.Linq). [Bart De Smet]

• Download page:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=255295
• Bart's epic blog post:  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rxteam/archive/2012/06/17/reactive-extensions-v2-0-release-candidate-available-now.aspx

Here's a trivial example employing C++ LINQ:

vector<int> some_primes(size_t howMany)
{
       auto xs = from(int_range(0, INT_MAX))
                      .where(is_prime)
                      .take(howMany);
       return xs.to_vector();
             // or: vector<int>(begin(xs), end(xs));
}

Table of Contents:

[00:00] GoingNative(); //Charles flies solo for this episode. Make sure you check out the sessions from Developing Windows 8 Metro style apps with C++ event. This is the only place to learn (deeply) about WRL and C++ + XAML + DX, for example. Herb Sutter's keynote is excellent, of course.

[03:00] Charles interviews software developer Aaron Lahman. Aaron explains (whiteboard and demo included) the work he's doing building a LINQ library for C++ and Reactive Extensions for C. Aaron is great at explaining what he's doing (and why he's doing it). Thank you, Aaron! Go Rx!!

[39:58] ~GoingNative();

Highlights of this release:

Support for .NET 4.5 Beta.

Support for .NET for Metro style applications and Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

Rx Portable Library Beta.

Await support on IObservable<T>.

Async variants of various operators.

Scheduling using async methods.

Generalized time-based operators.

Improved performance.

You can read much more about this release in Bart's (lengthy) blog post, including download links and installation instructions.

Here, Bart J.F. De Smet - the lead developer of Rx - and Matthew sit down for a C9 conversation about RxJS (no demos or code-on-screen - this is purely a conversation). Who knows where it will go (will we only talk about RxJS?) and who'll make a cameo appearance at the very beginning Tune in.

Enjoy!

Follow Matthew: @mattpodwysocki

Rx v1.11011.11 (Experimental) features include:

Improved Exception Management

Prefer Async Policy

Interoperability with Task<T>

FromEventPattern Support for WinRT Events Various Changes to System.Reactive The New

System.Reactive.WindowsRuntime Assembly

This release of Rx includes support for WinRT interop and to build Metro style applications leveraging Rx for event processing

IAsyncInfo Conversions

Release Notes

Download

 Relevant links:

• John's Blog and on Twitter (@john_papa)
• Jesse's blog and on Twitter (@jesseliberty)

Follow us on Twitter @SilverlightTV or on the web at http://silverlight.tv

I recently visited the great Bart De Smet to learn more about Ix. As usual, Bart clearly explains what Ix is and why they've built this library, what it's for, and when to go interactive. This is a deep conversational piece with plenty of whiteboarding during which we also talk about the current status of IQbservable. Tune in. Learn.

Download the Challenge

Download the Challenge

Today, we're very pleased to announce that Rx is now officially official with the final V1 release! 

Rx V1 will ship as a stable release with professionally-written technical documentation, developer samples and...ready? Product support!!

Since Rx is written and maintained by Erik Meijer's team you can imagine that there will continue to be innovation and experimentation at a quick pace. The Rx cutting edge will manifest itself as experimental releases. The real-world-developer-tested innovations in the experimental releases will most likely find their way into subsequent stable releases, which are the bits you'll want to build your event stream processing empire on top of.

The experimental releases will allow you to see and touch where the technology is heading, as well as help the team go in the right direction, as you have already done. Without developers using Rx in the real world and providing feedback to the Rx team, it is unlikely that Rx would be in the shape that it is today. Thank you!!

Here, I catch up with Rx developers  Wes Dyer and Bart De Smet to get more information (and to see if I can get Wes and Bart writing on the whiteboard at the same time). Tune in,

Congratulations to the Rx team!!

=======================================================================================

Download Rx V1:                         

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26649 (or using NuGet)

Rx Documentation: 
            
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=221892 (conceptual)
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=221873 (reference)

Rx Workshop:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Rx-Workshop/Rx-Workshop-Introduction
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Rx-Workshop/Rx-Workshop-Event-Processing
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Rx-Workshop/Rx-Workshop-Observables-versus-Events
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Rx-Workshop/Rx-Workshop-Unified-Programming-Model
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Rx-Workshop/Rx-Workshop-Writing-Queries
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Rx-Workshop/Rx-Workshop-Schedulers

Rx Forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/rx/threads

Welcome to the Rx Workshop! Rx developers (they design and implement Rx) Wes Dyer and Bart De Smet will guide you through a series of sessions that will get you up to speed with Rx fundamentals rather quickly. Tune in!

See the rest of the Rx Workshop tutorials.

2 -> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Rx-Workshop/Rx-Workshop-Observables-versus-Events
3 -> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Rx-Workshop/Rx-Workshop-Event-Processing
4 -> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Rx-Workshop/Rx-Workshop-Unified-Programming-Model
5- > http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Rx-Workshop/Rx-Workshop-Writing-Queries
6 -> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Rx-Workshop/Rx-Workshop-Schedulers

Download the Challenge

Download the Challenge

Download the Challenge

Download the Challenge

Download the Challenge

Long live "Volta" Rx!!

C