VS2010 Beta 2 is now available for download for MSN subscribers.

I’ve posted a new screen cast on the Rock Solid Knowledge screen casts side that provides an example of how to partition a set of data for parallel processing.

The screen cast covers a simple way using Parallel.ForEach, and a more efficient version combining the use of Barrier.

You can checkout the screen cast and others here

Whilst working with .NET 4 parallel extensions I often find the need to extend the framework to assist me in various day to day tasks.  I’ve finally got around to compiling a library of such extensions.

The extensions include the following

• Set Process Affinity, so I can see how my algorithm scales on a different number of cores.  Will select non hyperthreaded cores first.
• Determine the number of Real cores, not including hyperthreading ones.
• A Range type that supports the partitioning of a range so that I can farm sub ranges out to different tasks
• A Sequence class for building non integer parallel loops or loops with steps other than 1
• Finally a simplified way to handle aggregated exceptions.

You can download the library from here

Its a Visual Studio 2010 project, containing the library and a unit test project which should provide enough insight to how the library works.

Im very keen to know what people think of the aggregate exception handling.

I just got back from speaking at Software Architect 2009. I had a great time at the conference and thanks to everyone who attended my sessions. As promised the slides and demos are now available on the Rock Solid Knowledge website and you can get them from the Conferences page.

I had a lucky coincidence while speaking at Software Architect 2009. Four hours before I gave a talk on Contract First Design with WCF the WSCF Blue guys released version 1.0 of their tool. Contract first design is the most robust way to build services that potentially have to exist in a heterogeneous environment – it essentially means you start from the WSDL which means everyone can consume the service as no implementation details leak on to the wire. The major stumbling block in the WCF world has been there is no tool that can take a WSDL document and generate the skeleton of a service that implements the defined contract. Finally we have a released tool that does this very thing in the shape of WSCF Blue. In fact it can go further than that because writing WSDL by hand is too much like heavy lifting for many people – so WSCF Blue can also take one or more schema and runs a wizard to build a WSDL document that creates a contract based on the messages in the schema documents.

WSCF Blue solves a problem that has been there since WCF 3.0 and the great thing is that its free – being release on codeplex

Enjoy!

Finally got around to delivering a conference talk on this subject this week at Software Architecture Week, its a topic myself and Kevin Jones are constantly being asked.  Of course a quick google reveals the answer there are numerous rants about this evil pattern.  But like most things in life its not as simple as yes or no. 

Our goal for this talk was to expose the areas were this pattern causes a developer a whole load of pain.  In fact one member of the audience was experiencing such pain in his attempt to take legacy code base heavily utilising singletons and start to write unit tests. 

So whilst the majority of the time was spent examining the consequences of using the singleton pattern we also took time to  highlight that one or two singletons correctly positioned in your application could in fact enable unit testing, and coding to interface without having to refactor large areas of a legacy code base.

This talk took the format of a short geeky play, featuring two developers trying to wrestle with getting the job done and unit testing.  You can download the script and accompanying code

So like all good consultants our answer to this question is “It Depends”

I used to be a C# MVP a couple of years ago. When I took on the role of CTO of DevelopMentor I found I had a far smaller amount of time to devote to community based activity and so I lost my MVP status. I stepped down as DevelopMentor’s CTO back in January and as a result suddenly found I had time again and so can often be found hanging out at the MSDN WCF forum, speaking at conferences, etc. Consequently I have just heard that I’ve been awarded MVP status for Connected Systems :-) - nice to be back in the fold

Thanks to everyone who came to my sessions at BASTA! My first time at that conference and I had a great time. Here are the slides and demos

What’s New in Workflow 4.0

Contract First Development with WCF

Generics, Extension Methods and Lambdas – Beyond List<T>