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The .NET4 Countdown Synchronization Primitive

Phil Pennington — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:53:00 GMT

Join Josh and Steve as they demonstrate how to use the new .NET4 Countdown event synchronization primitive in task coordination scenarios.

Countdown and related constructs are new with .NET4 and Visual Studio 2010.

Learn more about the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center.

Lazy Optimized Resource Initialization

Phil Pennington — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:48:00 GMT

Join Josh and Steve as they demonstrate how to use the new .NET4 Lazy<T> class in optimized object initialization scenarios.

Lazy<T> is one of many new thread-safe data-structures available with .NET4 and Visual Studio 2010.

Learn more about the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center.

Concurrent Visualization Techniques in the VS2010 Profiler

Phil Pennington — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:34:00 GMT

Join Bill Colburn as he demonstrates useful features of the Concurrency Visualizer available in VS2010. He discusses visualization of parallel-for loops, I/O reports, sorting the display of threads, and viewing thread affinity.

Check-out the following additional resources:
- The Parallel Visualization Blog
- The MSDN Parallel Computing Dev-Center
- Visual Studio 2010 on Learning Center
- Download Visual Studio 2010 beta2
- Hazim Shafi’s Blog on Windows Parallel Performance Tools

BlockingCollection Demonstration in Producer-Consumer Scenarios

Phil Pennington — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:22:00 GMT

Join Josh and Steve as they demonstrate how to use the new .NET4 BlockingCollection<T> class in class Producer/Consumer parallel computing scenarios.

BlockingCollection<T> is one of many new thread-safe data-structures available with .NET4 and Visual Studio 2010.

Learn more about the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center.

Thread Visualization in the VS2010 Profiler

Phil Pennington — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:12:00 GMT

Join James Rapp once again as he dives deeper into the new parallel performance analysis tools available in Visual Studio 2010. In this video, he discusses ways of managing the quantity of data presented by the profiler and how to obtain meaningful statistics about your parallel application.

Check-out the following additional resources:
- The Parallel Visualization Blog
- The MSDN Parallel Computing Dev-Center
- Visual Studio 2010 on Learning Center
- Download Visual Studio 2010 beta2
- Hazim Shafi’s Blog on Windows Parallel Performance Tools

New Parallel Capabilities of the Visual Studio 2010 Profiler

Phil Pennington — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:17:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 (currently in beta) includes new Parallel Performance Analysis tools. The new Profiler is a must-have tool for Developers interested in designing new "many-core" parallel-computing applications. Join James as he illustrates the profiler, profiling-options, and concurrency visualization techniques.

Check-out the following additional resources:
- The Parallel Visualization Blog
- The MSDN Parallel Computing Dev-Center
- Visual Studio 2010 on Learning Center
- Download Visual Studio 2010 beta2
- Hazim Shafi’s Blog on Windows Parallel Performance Tools

Deploying IIS 7.5 + FASTCGI + PHP on Server Core

Phil Pennington — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:06:00 GMT

Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core introduces support for subsets of the 2.0/3.0/3.5 .NET Framework in addition to a number of other new optional features and roles. These additions extend the role of Server Core system deployments to not only enterprise network service hosting but also to application hosting. The Framework additions make it possible to host The Web Platform including ASP.NET web applications. Windows PowerShell is available along with the integrated IIS Provider. Application Developers should ensure their new and existing Enterprise Solutions integrate well with the Server Core deployment environment.

FastCGI is a language-independent, scalable, open extension to CGI that provides high performance. The FastCGI extension is available in IIS 7.5 and enables application frameworks such as PHP to achieve improved performance and stability on Internet Information Services.

This demo illustrates FastCGI configuration on a Windows Server 2008 R2, Server Core deployment target.

Learn more at the IIS Extensions portal.

Take a video tour of Server Core application development scenarios via MSDN Channel9 and find detailed samples on MSDN Code Gallery. See live Server Core demos at the Windows Server 2008 R2 Launch Tour.

Windows PowerShell : Variables, Types, and Operators

Phil Pennington — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:44:00 GMT

Join James Brundage, PowerShell Test Team SDE, as he introduces Variables, Types, and Operators.

Windows PowerShell is a Windows command-line shell designed for ease-of-use not only by system administrators but also for application and system developers. The shell includes an interactive prompt and a scripting environment that can be used independently or in combination. PowerShell V2 is available by default with both R2 and Windows 7 and, via an optional update, previous versions of Windows.

For Developers specifically, Windows PowerShell in combination with the Windows Management Infrastructure (WinRM, WS-Management, WMI) provides a great way to automate server hosted solutions.   For example, if you implement all your administration logic via PowerShell, then layer the MMC GUI over the top (i.e. MMC calls PowerShell to get the work done) - you will have given your Enterprise customers the absolute best of all worlds; GUIs, scripting, and delegated, remote automation.

Unlike most scripting shells, which accept and return text, Windows PowerShell is integrated with the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) and the .NET Framework, and thus deals in .NET objects instead of just text strings. This fundamental change in the environment brings entirely new tools and methods to the management and configuration of Windows.   Application Developers may extend their solutions with custom PowerShell based object models that integrate seamlessly with platform management solutions.

Like many shells, Windows PowerShell gives you access to the file system on the computer. In addition, Windows PowerShell providers enable you to access other data stores, such as the registry and the digital signature certificate stores, as easily as you access the file system.

Version 2 of Windows Powershell introduces an array of new features including remote sessions, an integrated script environment, debugging tools, and much more.

Continue your video tour of PowerShell V2 via MSDN Channel9 and TechNET Edge. Don't miss the reusable scripts and techniques at the PowerShell Script-Center website. Subscribe to the PowerShell Team Blog RSS Feed for the latest info.

See related episodes here.

Windows PowerShell : Remote Session Custom Configuration

Phil Pennington — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:14:00 GMT

Join Krishna Vutukuri, Windows PowerShell SDE, as he demonstrates how to customize remote session behaviour using session configuration concepts. Example usage scenarios include invocation of start-up scripts and domain-user feature access restrictions.

Continue your video tour of Windows PowerShell V2 via MSDN Channel9 and TechNET Edge. Find reusable scripts and techniques at the PowerShell Script-Center. Subscribe to the RSS feed at the Team Blog for the latest Windows PowerShell information. Get the demo scripts.

Windows PowerShell : Advanced Remote Sessions

Phil Pennington — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:20:00 GMT

Join Krishna Vutukuri, Windows PowerShell SDE, as he demonstrates advanced remoting concepts including command execution across a set of machines, session connection optimization, user-prompts within remote sessions, background jobs, connection state information, and passing session arguments.

Continue your video tour of Windows PowerShell V2 via MSDN Channel9 and TechNET Edge. Find reusable scripts and techniques at the PowerShell Script-Center. Subscribe to the RSS feed at the Team Blog for the latest Windows PowerShell information. Get the demo scripts.

Windows PowerShell : Remote Sessions

Phil Pennington — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:57:00 GMT

Join Krishna Vutukuri, Windows PowerShell SDE, as he demonstrates how to create and use Romote Sessions. Learn how to invoke remote commands, establish remote session persistence, and enter an existing session.

Continue your video tour of Windows PowerShell V2 via MSDN Channel9 and TechNET Edge. Find reusable scripts and techniques at the PowerShell Script-Center. Subscribe to the RSS feed at the Team Blog for the latest Windows PowerShell information. Get the demo scripts.

Windows PowerShell : Create Object CmdLets

Phil Pennington — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 21:09:00 GMT

Join James Brundage, Windows PowerShell Test Team SDE, as he demonstrates how to create your own Object CmdLets.

Continue your video tour of Windows PowerShell V2 via MSDN Channel9 and TechNET Edge. Find reusable scripts and techniques at the PowerShell Script-Center. Subscribe to the RSS feed at the Team Blog for the latest Windows PowerShell information. Get the demo scripts.

Windows PowerShell : -Object Family of CmdLets and the Object Pipeline

Phil Pennington — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 21:07:00 GMT

Join James Brundage, Windows PowerShell Test Team SDE, as he introduces the -Object family of cmdlets.

Continue your video tour of Windows PowerShell V2 via MSDN Channel9 and TechNET Edge. Find reusable scripts and techniques at the PowerShell Script-Center. Subscribe to the RSS feed at the Team Blog for the latest Windows PowerShell information. Get the demo scripts.

Windows PowerShell : Arrays, Conditionals, Collections, and Loops

Phil Pennington — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:59:00 GMT

Join James Brundage, Windows PowerShell Test Team SDE, as he introduces Arrays, Conditionals, Collections, and Loops.

Continue your video tour of Windows PowerShell V2 via MSDN Channel9 and TechNET Edge. Don't miss the reusable scripts and techniques at the PowerShell Script-Center website. Subscribe to the PowerShell Team Blog RSS Feed for the latest info.

New File Classification Infrastructure - Part 4, The FCI API

Phil Pennington — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:56:00 GMT

The File Classification Infrastructure (FCI) is a new Windows Server technology included within the File Server Role. FCI is available with Windows Server 2008 R2.

FCI is used to:

1. Define file classification properties.

2. Define automatic classification policies, rules, and triggers.

3. Develop custom extensions.

In this episode, learn how to use the FCI API's within the Windows 7 SDK to build custom FCI extensions. See the additional episodes and learn more at Code Gallery and the FCI team blog.

See more Windows Server 2008 R2 on Channel9.

Try-out the new Windows Server 2008 R2 Developer Training Kit.

Explore MSDN Code Gallery projects. Find additional resources at the FCI Homepage.

New File Classification Infrastructure - Part 3, Business Critical Files

Phil Pennington — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:56:00 GMT

The File Classification Infrastructure (FCI) is a new Windows Server technology included within the File Server Role. FCI is available with Windows Server 2008 R2.

FCI is used to:

1. Define file classification properties.

2. Define automatic classification policies, rules, and triggers.

3. Develop custom extensions.

In this episode, learn how to use FCI to establish custom business policies and rules. See the additional episodes and learn more at Code Gallery and the FCI team blog.

Find more resources at the FCI homepage.

New File Classification Infrastructure - Part 2, Compressing Stagnant Files

Phil Pennington — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:56:00 GMT

Additional resources on the FCI homepage.

New File Classfication Infrastructure - Part 1, How to Manage Stale Data

Phil Pennington — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:55:00 GMT

The File Classification Infrastructure (FCI) is a new Windows Server technology included within the File Server Role. FCI is available with Windows Server 2008 R2.

FCI is used to:

1. Define file classification properties.

2. Define automatic classification policies, rules, and triggers.

3. Develop custom extensions.

In this episode, learn how an IT Admin would use FCI to identify and manage stale data within the file system. See the additional episodes and learn more at Code Gallery and the FCI team blog.

Additional resources on the FCI hompage.

The C++ Concurrency Runtime - Asynchronous Agents Library

Phil Pennington — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:55:00 GMT

The Asynchronous Agents Library (or just Agents Library) provides a programming model that enables you to increase the robustness of concurrency-enabled application development. The Agents Library is a C++ template library that promotes an actor-based programming model and in-process message passing for fine-grained dataflow and pipelining tasks. The Agents Library builds upon the scheduling and resource management components of the Concurrency Runtime.

The agent class itself is intended for course grained parallelism/components that handle larger computationally intensive tasks or collections of smaller tasks. Fundamentally, agents are tasks that have an observable lifecycle and communicate with other agents by using message passing. Agents are NOT intended to be used for fine-grained parallelism; for that, the patterns and constructs in the Parallel Patterns Library are better suited.

You'll want to subscribe to the Native Concurrency blog, find more resource and download example code from Code Gallery.

The C++ Concurrency Runtime - Parallel Patterns Library

Phil Pennington — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:55:00 GMT

The C++ Concurrency Runtime is new with Visual Studio 2010 and currently in beta. The runtime encapsulates and extends many new operating system features including NUMA resource locality and User-Mode-Scheduling.

The Parallel Patterns Library (PPL) provides an imperative programming model that promotes scalability and ease-of-use for developing concurrent applications. The PPL raises the level of abstraction between your application code and the underlying thread/task scheduling mechanisms by providing generic, type-safe algorithms and containers that act on data in parallel. The PPL also enables you to develop applications that scale by providing alternatives to shared state.

The PPL provides the following features:

Task Parallelism: a mechanism to execute several work items (tasks) in parallel.
Parallel algorithms: generic algorithms that act on collections of data in parallel.
Parallel containers and objects: generic container types that provide safe concurrent access to their elements.

By using PPL, you can introduce fine-grained parallelism without even having to manage a scheduler. You would use the Asynchronous Agents Library instead to express coarse-grained parallelism.

You'll want to subscribe to the Native Concurrency blog, find more resource and download example code from Code Gallery.

Native Web Services, Part 2 - Build a WWSAPI Web Service

Phil Pennington — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 02:12:00 GMT

With the Windows Web Services API (WWSAPI), you can connect your C/C++ client applications with web services. You can also create C/C++ server-side web service end-points. WWSAPI is new with Windows 7 (client) and Windows Server 2008 R2 (server). WWSAPI is also back-ported to all formally supported versions of Windows (client and server). The WWSAPI runtime library (WebServices.dll) is a native-code implementation of WS-* family of protocols for SOAP based web services.

WWSAPI enables several solution scenarios and benefits including:

1. Implement web services in native C/C++ code on both Windows client and server. C/C++ application developers have often requested this platform technology capability but were previously forced to write their own or interface their native-code solutions with managed-code wrappers.

2. Achieve interoperability with web services implemented using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), ASP.NET XML Web Services, and even services implemented using non-Microsoft implementations of WS-* libraries.

3. Construct web services with minimal service startup time and minimal process working-set dependencies.

4. Use web services implementations in resource-constrained deployment environments.

5. Avoid native-management interop scenarios with potentially costly marshalling side-effects.

This is part 2 of a 2 episode series and focuses upon using WWSAPI to construct a web service. The example illustrates adding a web-service interface to a native (presumably legacy) application. The demonstration provides a comparison between using a managed (WCF) interface and a native (WWSAPI) interface involving sorting algorthms with differing interop costs.

Find sample code and additional technical details at MSDN Code Gallery.

See part 1 of this series here.

Native Web Services, Part 1 - Build a WWSAPI Client

Phil Pennington — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 02:11:00 GMT

WWSAPI enables several solution scenarios and benefits including:

3. Construct web services with minimal service startup time and minimal process working-set dependencies.

4. Use web services implementations in resource-constrained deployment environments.

5. Avoid native-management interop scenarios with potentially costly marshalling side-effects.

This is part 1 of a 2 episode series and focuses upon using WWSAPI from a client application. The example illustrates a client application using WWSAPI to interact with a "Sort Service".

Find sample code and additional technical details at MSDN Code Gallery.

See part 2 of this series here.

Configuring WebDAV Extension and Deploying PHP Applications

Phil Pennington — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:33:00 GMT

The IIS WebDAV extension module incorporates new features that enable web authors to publish content easier than before, and offers web administrators more security and deployment options.

Windows Server 2008 R2 incorporates the WebDAV extension module feature. All you have to do is to enable it.

Watch this how-to demo and learn more about IIS Extensions here.

See more Windows Server2008 R2 webcasts.

Find samples at MSDN Code Gallery.

Trigger Started Services

Phil Pennington — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:10:00 GMT

The Windows operating system features built-in infrastructure services (Service Control Manager and Task Scheduler) that help manage background processes. Windows takes advantage of the built-in services to provide system management, device management, and system maintenance functionality.

Significant improvements have been made to this infrastructure for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Developers can use these improvements to develop Windows services that are efficient and that contribute to the overall system performance and security.

For example, a service can register to be started or stopped when a trigger event occurs. This eliminates the need for services to start when the system starts, or for services to poll or actively wait for an event; a service can start when it is needed, instead of starting automatically whether or not there is work to do.

Watch this demo to see an illustration of how to develop a service which starts on system triggered events.

Learn more at the MSDN Library. See the step-by-step guide with sample code.

New Power Management Features : Windows Server 2008 R2

Phil Pennington — Thu, 21 May 2009 01:07:00 GMT

Windows Server 2008 R2 (i.e. "Windows 7 Server") introduces significant advancements in Server Power Management capabilities. You may never win a Nobel prize for building an application that plays well with Server Power Management policies nor by configuring a power-optimized data-center, but you'll gain lots of respect for returning real green cash savings for your customers. We think that makes lots of of sense for both Developers and IT Professionals.

Gain insight into new and future power management features and learn more about Windows system Power Management via additional resources listed at MSDN Code Gallery.