by Ross Buggins9. November 2010 15:40This is post one of my new blog, separate to our core Shore Tech Blog. I've made the move to force me to keep a tech and rambling blog as well as our business blog (which admittedly doesn't get updated too often anyway).
I'm going to keep the blog as technical as possible, with a target of a post a week. Hopefully it will follow along side the work that is currently going on here at Shore Tech and will let me document any cool tricks and tips I find out along the way.
Visual Studio Async CTP
To keep with the tech theme in every post I'm quickly going to mention PDC 2010. I've started wading through the seemingly hundreds hours ofwebcasts. My highlight so far is the new async CTP.
Abders Hejlsberg presented "The Future of C# and Visual Basic" with the theme being centred upon Asyncronous Programming. The walkthrough followed designing a silverlight application to use the oData stream at NetFlicks. It demonstrated that by using asyncronous programming you can keep great UI responsiveness with a single thread being used. Its demo'ed in a standard asp.net application.
With just two words per method, async in the method header, and await before an asyncronous method call, you program in a fully ansyncronous manner without the need for delegates, events, begins and ends, pretty good I recon. Its based around usingTask<TResult> which is part of the Task Parallel Library (TPL) which came about with .NET 4.
I'll probably follow this with a full post on the Asyn CTP as soon as I've had a proper play with it.