InfoQ Homepage .NET Content on InfoQ
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New.NET Async Control Flow Explained
Alan Berman recently explained the details of how the new Async and Await keywords impact the flow of control. Using these keywords allows an asynchronous function's return values to be processed without using explicitly defined callbacks. This allows for more natural code grouping, as calling and processing of an asynchronous function can occur in the same function.
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Using Messaging and Scheduling for Lock-free Access to Shared State
In a message passing system there may be times when mutable data must be shared amongst many tasks. In traditional programming this would be handled by a read-writer block, which would allow one writer thread to block all other threads while it updates the shared data. With a technique found in frameworks such as TPL Dataflow it is possible to avoid this.
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Boost Website Performance with the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service
The newly-released Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service stores distributed data in-memory to improve performance on Windows Azure and SQL Azure. It’s highly scalable, will cache any type of data regardless of size, and is secured via the AppFabric Access Control Service.
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Asynchronous Message Processing using Task Parallel Library and Reactive Extensions
A new preview of TPL Dataflow has recently been released along with Visual Studio Async. Along with performance enhancements and stronger ties with the Reactive Framework, it is being positioned as a foundation for building actor/agent style frameworks as opposed to a complete solution.
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Message Queuing Options for .NET
When building larger scale applications, message queues are often very helpful for both distributing and aggregating workloads. In the .NET ecosystem there are several options available for message queuing. This article highlights some of the more popular and unique offerings as well as the basic terminology needed to evaluate them.
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Software Engineer best rated Job in 2011
According to careertrack.com the best rated job in 2011 is Software Engineer, at least in the US. 200 professions across various industries, skill levels, and salaries have been surveyed to calculate the ranking which is determined by taking the work environment, physical demands, outlook, income and stress into account.
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Steve Marx Explores Hidden Gems in Windows Azure
Steve Marx, Tactical Strategist at Windows Azure, gave a presentation at MIX11 on “10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do with Windows Azure”, highlighting a list of things that can be done with WA but may not be common knowledge. We got in touch with Steve to ask him more about AppFabric, Startup Tasks, Blob leasing and more -
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Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service 2.0 Supports New Identity Providers
At the recent MIX 2011 conference, Microsoft announced updates to its existing cloud-based Access Control Service (ACS) that supports new web-friendly and enterprise-grade identity providers, while beefing up its support for standard communication protocols, improving the developer experience and enhancing the online management portal.
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GitHub Passes 2m Repositories
GitHub recently announced they had passed two million git repositories hosted, with 70% being created in the last year alone and an expected 1m users later this year. What else is new at GitHub?
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Capture the Application, not just the Screenshot with VS Lab Management
Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 is a highly integrated virtualization, development, and testing tool. When testers encounter an error they can create a snapshot of the virtual environment at that moment: not just a screenshot, but the current state of the application or website and all the servers involved.
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NuGet packages now come with Debug symbols, Sources
The NuGet team has announced a feature that allows package authors to package their sources along with their assemblies for distribution through NuGet. This enables developers using these packages to debug through the sources of the referenced packages easily, without having to search for the source code on the project hosting server or do complicated setups.
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Microsoft Virtual Academy on Cloud Computing
Microsoft has opened a free online virtual academy for students interested in learning and graduating in Microsoft Cloud Computing technologies.
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Footsteps: Deterministic Logging and Replay for JavaScript
Debugging event driven applications has always been notoriously difficult. The research project Footsteps project seeks to address the problems of reproducibility by offering a logging and replay framework that records non-deterministic events such as mouse clicks and random number generation. No plugins or special browsers are needed, this done entirely with JavaScript.
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Mono Brings Silverlight to the Android Tablet and Phone
Under the mantra, “We love .NET more than Microsoft”, Mono has been making the promise of cross-platform .NET development a reality. First there was the native toolkit support for iOS and Android, now they are opening up the world of Android tablets to Silverlight developers.
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Silo: Using Hashing and Delta Update to Improve Today’s Browsers
On Tuesday Microsoft Researcher James Mickens discussed Silo, a framework for using hashing and delta-updates to dramatically reduce the number of round-trips to the server needed when loading a website. The technology works in today’s browsers without the need for plugins.