Thanks for joining us on C9, Bjorn! Keep on listening to software's deep issues and help correct them (hopefully without the need of powerful "medication")!

Bjorn's YOW! speaker page

The YOW! Developer Conference offers outstanding opportunities to learn more about the latest practices, technologies, and methodologies for building innovative software solutions as well as the chance to meet and network with international software experts and other talented developers in Australia. Thanks to Dave Thomas and the event's excellent staff - Mary Catherine (MC), Lisa, Aino, Melissa, and others - for inviting me to this excellent pure developer event and thanks to all of the speakers for letting me take some of their time to record conversations for Channel 9. If you live in Australia, or aren't too far away, or just like to travel (who doesn't?), then you need to go to this yearly event. It's outstanding. There are many great developers down under. That's for sure. The speakers are exceptional—Dave and team set a high bar!

Here, we talk about functional programming—when to go functional and why—and Tony addresses some of the problems that face developers who want or need to go functional but possess only an imperative way of thinking when it comes to designing and writing software. It's the functional way of thinking that most newcomers to functional programming find most difficult. Of course, there's no conversation about functional programming without talking about monads, so we talk about monadic design (and definition).

Thanks for joining us on C9 Tony!

Tony's YOW! speaker page

The YOW! Developer Conference offers outstanding opportunities to learn more about the latest practices, technologies, and methodologies for building innovative software solutions as well as the chance to meet and network with international software experts and other talented developers in Australia. Thanks to Dave Thomas and the event's excellent staff—Mary Catherine (MC), Lisa, Aino, Melissa, and others—for inviting me to this excellent pure developer event and thanks to all of the speakers for letting me take some of their time to record conversations for Channel 9. If you live in Australia, or aren't too far away, or just like to travel (who doesn't?), then you need to go to this yearly event. It's outstanding. There are many great developers down under. That's for sure. The speakers are exceptional—Dave and team set a high bar!

Table of Contents (click time code links to navigate player accordingly)

[00:00] GoingNative();//Getting faster at show construction - still have some optimizations to make...
[01:56] Charles interviews Raul about Raul and the VC++ design-time system (Intellisense, Go-to-Definition, Auto-complete, Syntax coloring, etc...)
[37:20] ~GoingNative(); //We're really performant this time

We really want to hear from you, so please tweet feedback to @C9GoingNative (follow us!) and send your requests, ideas, complaints, praises, hate mail, and love letters to C9GoingNative [at] hotmail [dot] com. We will read and respond to all messages! That's how we roll, brothers and sisters. And if you're a Facebook user, please join our C9::GoingNative Facebook group.

Go native!

Martin is a Java and C++ developer and employs an analog design methodology to his digital development efforts. He thinks through the conceptual design and paints a detailed picture of the solution, then he writes code. Many developers do this, of course, but sometimes we don't think through the problem thoroughly enough before we start writing code. This is especially true when it comes to solving hard problems of a concurrent computing nature.

To Martin, the concurrency problem is as much a developer methodology, educational and behavioral problem as it is a pure technological one. We talk about this, of course. His perspectives on the subject are refreshing.

Tune in. Enjoy. Learn.

Thanks for joining us on C9, Martin. Keep pushing the envelope.

http://yowaustralia.com.au/YOW2011/general/details.html?speakerId=2336

The YOW! Developer Conference offers outstanding opportunities to learn more about the latest practices, technologies, and methodologies for building innovative software solutions as well as the chance to meet and network with international software experts and other talented developers in Australia. Thanks to Dave Thomas and the event's excellent staff - Mary Catherine (MC), Lisa, Aino, Melissa, and others - for inviting me to this excellent pure developer event and thanks to all of the speakers for letting me take some of their time to record conversations for Channel 9. If you live in Australia, or aren't too far away, or just like to travel (who doesn't?), then you need to go to this yearly event. It's outstanding. There are many great developers down under. That's for sure. The speakers are exceptional—Dave and team set a high bar!

It's been WAY too long since we've had Brian Beckman sharing knowledge, insights and perspectives on Channel 9. This changes now!

Needless to say, I was incredibly happy to spend an hour with Brian learning all about what he's up to these days. Not surprisingly, he's writing code and employing Rx and monads to solve very interesting problems. In this conversation (a code lesson, algorithm survey, a splash of random topical diversion), Brian explains and demonstrates his latest endeavor: implementing the Viterbi algorithm in C#. What's the Viterbi algorithm, Brian? What are hidden Markov models? What are you using this stuff for? Where does Rx fit into this? What's going on? By the way, it's awesome to learn that a Niner has been sharing C# monadic implementations with Brian (state monad, maybe monad).

Of course, no conversation with Brian - a physicist by training and a software architect at Microsoft - is complete without talking about some current physics problem: Finding the elusive Higgs Boson is all the rage these days, so we talk about what it means.

Brian also shares insights on Haskell, functional and hybrid programming languages (C# is imperative, but it provides functional capabilities like LINQ, for example, upon which Rx is built (Rx is LINQ-to-Streams or observable sequences of events, really)...). We also finally discuss his previous work at MS that we never got a chance to talk to him about while he was doing it. Before joining the Bing Mobile team, Brian was working on a project to create a new functional programming language. What was it?

Thank you, Brian!

Happy holidays from Channel 9 wherever you are and whatever, if anything, you're celebrating!


Notes and More:

The code Brian demos (download it, unzip it, launch VS, open the solution, then watch this video and play along): https://github.com/rebcabin/DotNetExtensionsImproved

From Wikipedia - information on Markov and Viterbi:

A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a statistical Markov model in which the system being modeled is assumed to be a Markov process with unobserved (hidden) states

The Viterbi algorithm is a dynamic programming algorithm for finding the most likely sequence of hidden states – called the Viterbi path – that results in a sequence of observed events, especially in the context of Markov information sources, and more generally, hidden Markov models.

His keynote was titled "Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces...Made Easy!" You'll be able to watch this as soon as the YOW! session videos are released to the web.

Here we learn what Damian wanted to achieve with his excellent and creative technical keynote. We also get Damian's thoughts on the state of modern development and how developers can maximize their capabilities (learn and use multiple languages—it's one of the best things you can do). And more. Thanks for taking the time to chat, Damian. I look forward to seeing your next talk!

Tune in. Enjoy.

 Damian's YOW! speaker page

The YOW! Developer Conference offers outstanding opportunities to learn more about the latest practices, technologies, and methodologies for building innovative software solutions as well as the chance to meet and network with international software experts and other talented developers in Australia. Thanks to Dave Thomas and the event's excellent staff - Mary Catherine (MC), Lisa, Aino, Melissa, and others - for inviting me to this excellent pure developer event and thanks to all of the speakers for letting me take some of their time to record conversations for Channel 9. If you live in Australia, or aren't too far away, or just like to travel (who doesn't?), then you need to go to this yearly event. It's outstanding. There are many great developers down under. That's for sure. The speakers are exceptional—Dave and team set a high bar!

Timecodes by George (thank you!):

[00:24] the reason behind Damian's talk

[02:15] comments on the positronic variable and multiverses simulation in Perl

[03:15] bad habits & 2 diff types of programmers

[06:50] language specialization issue

[08:50] analogy with natural languages

[10:45] current state of PERL

[14:00] question on the push towards the "The general purpose language"

[16:20] programming languages design tradeoffs

[17:20] comments about Damian's keynote address and developers feedback to it

[18:50] programming == manipulating reality with language == kind of same what physicists do

[21:10] math as a language and analogy as a means for communicating it

The Roslyn CTP previews the "next generation of language object models for code generation, analysis, and refactoring, and the upcoming support for scripting and interactive use of VB and C#."

Here, we meet the Roslyn Project design team (and the authors of the The Roslyn Project technical paper), Anders Hejlsberg, Karen Ng, Matt Warren, and Peter Golde. We discuss why Roslyn matters, how it works (briefly - we'll go deeper in the future), what it affords, and what it doesn't enable. This is a very interesting project and Roslyn promises to make Visual Studio code refactoring tools easier to build and potentially more powerful than they are today, but at a deeper level—Roslyn provides programmable access to a world class compiler infrastructure - language parser, semantic analyzer,etc - to managed developers (C#/VB).

It's an open question as to what you may actually end up doing with Roslyn if you are not, say, a visual tools developer, but that's the point of this random interlude (aka a Charles interview...though we do talk extensively about what Roslyn can be used for). With Roslyn, you have a lot of power and information at your disposal. How are you going to use it? What will you build?

Download the CTP, play around with Roslyn and provide feedback to the team. They want to hear from you!

Here, you'll learn about memory leak detection (CRT debug heap), unhandled exceptions, assert and error reporting, CRT entry points, CRT support for Unicode, SBCS and MBCC.

->Slides for this presentation

->Source code for the demos in this presentation

Tune in. Enjoy. Learn.

Here, Rick explores converting a simple loop to a set of actors or agents that communicate via message passing.  In particular he looks at the difference between a "control flow" style implementation and a "data flow" style implementation. The actor based approach is great because it separates the guts of the work from the loop logic so code looks more like the flow charts we draw on our whiteboards.

But, there's some down sides with the control flow approach and implementing the data flow approach can be tricky.  So Rick wanted to walk through an example of both to help illustrate the differences.

The downside to the control flow approach comes in when you have lots of agents, there tends to be either a 1:1 coupling of threads to tasks OR the tasks start taking on more than one responsibility and become less manageable.

A data flow style approach helps with this, because it decouples the 1:1 thread to task relationship but it can be an awkward refactoring if you're not used to it, it takes more code, and there aren't many examples available to look at on the web so Rick wanted to share another one.

 Download the code for this demo (will work in VC++ 2010)

Andrei Alexandrescu is the co-designer of the D programming language, technical author and research scientist at Facebook. He is also one of the world's C++ (and D...) template masters. His talk on PBD (policy based design) incorporated the mind bending use of variadic variadic template templates. As Gilad Bracha says, learning is brain damage.Thanks for the headache, Andrei!

Scott Meyers is one of the most respected C++ practioners in the industry. He is the author of Effective C++, More Effective C++, and Effective STL. Scott's talks on the C++11 Memory Model and Perfect Forwarding were outstanding. I wish we could post them here

Herb Sutter runs the C++11 ISO committee and is one of the world's leading C++ authorities. Congratulations to Herb and the rest of the people involved with pushing the language forward on the recent ratification of the C++11 international standard (treaty)! Herb's also Microsoft's architect for native programming languages, with an emphasis on C++. We'll find out here what Herb thinks of D.

Much thanks to Scott, Andrei and Herb for allowing me to randomize them right after the event ended to film this conversation. We spend a fair amount of time exploring the Beyond part of the equation. I know Niners will be extremely pleased to see three C++ titans appearing on C9 at the same time! Excellent.

Highlights:

[00:00] Event debriefing

[01:38] Scott on C++ developers

[03:18] Modern C++

[04:17] Why D, Andrei? 

[17:25] What problems does D solve that C++ can't?

[22:03] C++ and D interoperability (COM is old, but COM is good!)

[24:22] C++11 and Beyond

[26:01] Herb, ISO C++ Committee's next phase - what are you going to do?

[28:22] Scott, Andrei and Herb share perspectives on the ISO standards process, philosophies of language design, what C++ gets wrong, what it gets right

[49:48] Perspectives on this year's event and if/when C++ and Beyond will happen again

Tune in. Enjoy.

PS: If you can attend the next C++ and Beyond, whenever it may happen, I can't recommend it highly enough. Go. Follow @cppandbeyond to get updates and info on when/where the three amigos will get together again.

GoingNative is a new show on C9 dedicated to native development and native developers, with an emphasis on modern C++. In our inaugural episode, we keep things light and easy as we introduce you to what we're doing, why we're doing it, and how it will go down. The most important thing to realize right off the bat is that we want you to join us in the cockpit and help us fly this plane.

The main goal of episode 0 is to introduce the cast of characters, including your hosts Charles and Diego, and to present some ideas of how we think this show will be organized and executed. For example, Diego Dagum and I will typically construct the show, iterate through some code demos of varying complexity, converse with native developers from Microsoft and across the industry, and then destruct the show. We're not sure if we should add a news component—you tell us. We're not sure how much rambling you want hear from me and Diego—you tell us. And we're not sure how advanced we should make the programming section—you tell us (do we provide both intro and advanced topics?).

Now, of course this first episode isn't just a "Hey, we have a new show. Yay! Tell us what you want for next time" type of affair! We do talk about and demo a few new C++ features (shared_ptr, lambdas, auto) and have a conversation with Ale Contenti - development manager of VC's front-end compiler, libraries, and IDE.

[You can play around with the demos in this episode by downloading the free VC++ Express IDE]

Table of Contents(click time code links to navigate player accordingly)

[00:09]Charles and Diego construct the show and talk about modern C++ (how 'bout that set, eh?)
[07:27]Diego demos shared_ptr (Please see STL's incredible C9 lecture on shared_ptr for much more detail)
[10:01]Charles and Diego chat briefly about C++ lambdas
[10:32]Diego demos lambdas
[12:13]Charles and Diego chat briefly about C++ auto keyword (seen in the lambdas demo)
[13:30]Charles and Diego talk about the audience and how you can help us fly this plane
[15:32]Charles interviews Ale Contenti
[26:35]Charles and Diego destruct the show ( it won't usually take this long )

We really want to hear from you, so please tweet feedback to @C9GoingNative (follow us!) and send your requests, ideas, complaints, praises, hate mail, and love letters to C9GoingNative@hotmail.com. We will read and respond to all messages! That's how we roll, brothers and sisters. If you are a Facebook user (who isn't these days?), then please join our C9::GoingNative Facebook group.

Go native!

The fundamental concept here is the monad, and Greg has a novel and conceptually simplified explanation of what a monad is and why it matters. This is a very important and required first step in the series since the whole of it is about the application of monadic composition to real world web development.

In part 4, Greg primarily focuses on the idea that a monad is really an API—a view into the organization of data and control structures, not those structures themselves. In OO terms, it's an interface. To make this point concrete, Greg explores one of the simplest possible data structures supporting at least two different, though consistent, interpretations of the same API. The structure used, Conway's partisan games, turns out to be tailor-made for this investigation. Not only does this data structure have the requisite container-like shape, it provides opportunities to see just what's necessary in a container to implement the monadic interface. 

Running throughout the presentation is a more general comparison of reuse between an OO approach and a more functional one. When the monadic API is "mixed into" the implementing structure, we get less reuse than when the implementing structure is passed as a type parameter. Finally, doing the work puts us in a unique position to see not just how to generalize Conway's construction monadically, but also the underlying pattern that allows the generalization to suggest itself.

Source code for the Conway game
Slides for this presenation

See part 1
See part 2
See part 3

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.

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

In this video, Wolfram Schulte joins Victor to discuss the challenges of making concurrency easier for developers. One of the really interesting approaches that Victor and team are investigating is concurrency auto-tuning, and the example discussed here involve adding OS kernel-level support for auto-tuning user mode applications for manycore processor architectures. This is very fascinating research with great potential. Concurrency auto-tuner in an OS kernel? Concurrency-enlightened operating systems? Why not? Always great to meet young innovators with no fear of failure. I hope to see this type of thing materialize. Very interesting research and real world problem.  Go Victor. Go!

Thanks to Wolfram and Victor for another great conversation. Tune in.