Well, it was nice knowing you guys:

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/06/28/blizzard-introduces-diablo-3/

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/06/28/watch-diablo-3-teaser-and-gameplay-footage/

Anyone who's read this blog long enough to see some of the larger articles can tell that I am carrying the torch for UML.  I know a lot of people who model things, but not a lot who use what I consider to be the canonical real-deal modeling language: UML.  Even when I'm whitboarding, I'm drawing actual UML constructs for classes, interfaces, packages, and components.  If you draw boxes with lines connecting them to other boxes, people will often get the idea you are trying to convey, but there's something compelling about an industry standard modeling dialect with the ability to express some more subtle semantics than "this thing somethings with this thing".  Why don't we hear that much about UML in the blogosphere?  Why is Microsoft developing its own modeling language?  To some degree I blame the round-trip engineering folks who want to keep code and models in perfect sync, and there are some idioms in CLR languages that just don't succinctly map to UML: The Terski brought up the example of delegats.  My response is and has always been that I'm not interested in modeling at the implementation level: that's what code is for.

I still keep tabs on the DSL tools team at MSFT, so it was nice to hear from Steve Cook that UML tools are going to find their way into Architecture Edition.

http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecook/archive/2008/06/25/i-ve-got-a-new-job-working-on-dsls-and-uml.aspx

So, I am building a Silverlight 2 application related to my trip to Klipsch in Indianapolis this year, and found what seems to be to be a terrible bug in Silverlight 2 beta 2.  Multiple UIElements  cannot share event handlers.  What do I mean?  In my case, I have varous Paths inside a canvas and I'm creating hotspots.  When the mouse enters a given region, something slightly different will happen, however the exact same method is called for every single region when the mouse exits that Path.  So, suppose I have a Path called Damon, which happens to have some Damon-y things inside it and I'm going to display my name:

private void _damonPayne_MouseEnter(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)

AddCallout("D.R. Payne", "damonrpayne", "Hartford, WI", e);

When the mouse exists, I simply remove the UIElement representing the callout, which is the same for all regions on the page:

private void _damonPayne_MouseLeave(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)

Now, it would seem that I could make the functionality in RemoveOldCallout a MouseEventHandler and share the same method among the various paths:

protected void RemoveOldCallout(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)

Now, if I have another Path, I should be able to write code like _someOtherPath.MouseLeave += new MouseEventHandler(RemoveOldCallout);  This code, however, bombs with the following BadPropertyValue error:

Now, I have to write a different MouseLeave event for every single path on my page, and there's a lot of them.  I'll submit to Connect and hope this issue is fixed!

I went to a Geek Dinner last night at Botanas restaurant in Milwaukee.  This was different than the Nerd Dinners that we used to have.  The Nerd Dinners boiled down to people from the User Group socializing in a more free-form fashion than is practical before/after user group presentations.  The Geek Dinner we did last night was different.  The goal here was to bring together technologists, business people/entrepenuers, and people looking to invest/veture capitalists.  The result was a very cool time, for me at least.  There were several "idea" people there with something they were trying to accomplish.  It was fun (and I hope useful for them) to bring up potential pitfalls in the ventures they are trying; I believe I may now be a tech advisor for some neat things going on in Milwaukee.  I hope this becomes a regular occurance.

“The Man creates - the parasite says ‘Where’s my share?’ ” - Bioshock

In cities all over America, state and local governments are continually demanding that working, home-owning citizens shoulder an ever increasing tax burden.  These taxes come in the form of state income taxes, gasoline taxes, sales taxes, and more.  No single burden is as heavy as the property taxes levied on home owners.  These taxes are ostensibly to provide services such as waste removal, public schools, and the like.  Beneath the seemingly benign veneer of Public Service is a rotten core of income redistribution, rights violation, and political pull for sale.  The offenses are particularly grievous in the theory and practice of Not for Profit Organizations (NPOs) in America.

NPOs are able to apply for tax exempt status, which tends to be universal in nature once granted.  Revenues generated in excess of operating expenses are not taxed, sales tax is not paid, and property tax on land and buildings owned by the entity is not collected.  Given the relatively large amounts of money, we will focus on property taxes here.

The first problem with this arrangement is that there is no solid rational or moral foundation for giving favorable tax status to one type of organization over another.  The fact that many NPOs operate charitable ventures as their primary activity does not change this.  The activities undertaken by an organization are the concern of the business, their clients, and owners as long as the business is not breaking any laws or violating anyone’s individual rights.  It cannot be rationally supported that it is “in the public interest” to redistribute income from for-profit businesses to NPOs so that they can run public-funded charities.  As Ayn Rand stated in The Virtue of Selfishness:

“…there is no such entity as “the public,” since the public is merely a number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of “the public interest” with private interests means that the interests of some men are to be sacrificed to the interests and wishes of others.”

The income redistribution happening in favor of NPOs is obvious.  No taxes of any kind are paid, and yet taxpayer funded services are still consumed by these entities.  Consider the example of a church in a small town.  Does the garbage still get picked up?  Will the fire department show up if the church is on fire?  Do the police answer 911 calls from the church?  Is there running water?  Is waste water treated?  All of these things are funded by property taxes and various extra fees on service bills presented to normal citizens who lack the political pull and legal knowhow to create a special status for themselves.  If a small city of 10,000 people containing various private residences as well as churches spends $100,000 per year on waste pickup services, the citizens who pay taxes are directly paying for the NPOs.  Citizens who belong to the churches likely don’t mind, but what about everyone else?  In the same example town, should the hindu(1)  family really be subsidizing the services consumed by the evangelical christian (1) church?  Should the atheist family be subsidizing either?  Of course not, except for the threat of force, no one would choose to pay.

In a true free market society, one would be able to opt out of any service provided by the government and also no pay for it, or ideally these services (fire, waste, etc.) would be provided by competing private enterprises who had to convince me to use their service with a solid value proposition. This is not the case in any municipality I know of, and it gets worse. As in every case where the government tampers with the market and takes away freedoms, there are unintended side effects that distort the original intention of the laws that had no moral foundation to begin with. Wealthy retirees in Milwaukee with legal and financial pull are forming communities within the city (2) in order to avoid property taxes.  If a resident having a heart attack calls 911, the costs associated for this necessary and life saving service will be passed on in the form of ever-increasing property tax burdens.  Because the tax exempt status is near universal and practically unconditional, it is not restricted to the core aims of the organization.  In the same example town of 10,000 and countless other municipalities across America, religious organizations are using excess donations to purchase large tracts of land for speculation.  A private citizen doing so would be saddled with a hefty property tax bill, thereby forcing them to carefully consider the risk and reward possibly by buying land.  The market is therefore severely distorted because the rules are not the same for all participants.  It is impossible for this situation to continue, as Ayn Rand put it:

“In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.”

In the ever-escalating practice of making a smaller group of people support the lives of others, only evil can win and the process cannot go on forever.  Eventually, those who produce and pay will either opt-out of participating in this civilization or die as they are unable to sustain their own lives.  Where will the parasites get their free lunch then?  In the mean time, the happiness, goals, and values of some people are sacrificed to further the happiness, goals, and values of others.  This is a morally bankrupt practice and indefensible state of affairs.

The example town of 10,000 is in fact where I live and not a theoretical example at all.  In 2008 the property taxes for a 2,500 square foot home in this country town 35 miles from Milwaukee will work out to be around $600 per month.  There are no services to opt out of and no special status that most citizens could qualify for – the sacrificers must outnumber and out produce those collecting the sacrifices as a simple matter of mathematics.  The picture for retirement is particularly bleak and puts modern American life into perspective: a retiree could responsibly save for retirement over the course of their career, pay off their home mortgage, and still be forced to pay $600/month in today’s dollars for the privilege of having property that is already rightfully theirs.  Of course, the value of their home will adjust upwards for inflation every year, the actual tax rate can go up any time for any reason, and their hard earned savings can be eroded by the fiat currency policies of the Federal Reserve at any time by any amount.

One cannot help but feel that in America in the 21^st century, one does not actually own property, but rather one can lease it from the government for a non-negotiable and never ending extortion amount.

The root cause of these issues is the government’s ability to tax any group for any reason and for any amount.  Besides expanding government power far beyond protecting individual rights it creates an environment where some citizens gain a protected and elevated status and all other citizens are the losers who must pay the price for the lifestyles of others.  Citizens are free to use their time and money to support any cause they favor, in other words to work to gain and keep that which they value.  Waste removal services are free to give away services to a charitable institution favored by the ownership, and even though religious claims are not rationally supportable one must support the right of private citizens to donate to these institutions if they choose to do so.

Organizations with ideas that have merit will be able to succeed on their own, and those that do not will rightfully fail.  Stop using government force to make citizens subsidize protected organizations.

Footnotes

(1)    A note on grammar:  I have decided to refuse to capitalize names of religious bodies, etc.  Such habits only serve to reinforce the notion that religions are somehow special entities deserving elevated status and beyond rational criticism.  I do not share this opinion.

(2)    Please see this Milwaukee Magazine article for information on these communities: http://www.milwaukeemagazine.com/currentIssue/full_feature_story.asp?NewMessageID=11063

Dan has an article showing some nice syntactical sugar for spawning threads.  Dan has been studying the model of CCR, currently part of Robotics Studio.  The article specifically mentions the Compact Framework, but if you are doing full-framework development I would encourage you to check out the Parallel Extensions library as well.  It was mentioned at TechEd that the CCR might be refactored to use the TPL, so it'd be worth taking a peak at.  Using System.Threading.Tasks you could write code that starts to look less like the traditional ThreadStart code and more like what Dan is doing.  Without spending more than 30 seconds on this idea:

TaskCreationOptions tco = TaskCreationOptions.Detached;

TaskManagerPolicy tmp =

new TaskManagerPolicy(1, Environment.ProcessorCount,1,0, System.Threading.ThreadPriority.AboveNormal);

TaskManager tm = new TaskManager(tmp);

Task t = Task.Create(

(a) => { Console.WriteLine("doing some work"); },

If we start to see some multi-core mobile processors, it might be an interesting excercise to port a subset of PFX to the Compact Framework.

It looks like blogged.com has labled me "great".  I'll take it!

While looking on Reggie's blog for news on MySQL support for the Entity Framework, I enjoyed reading this article.  I continue to be amazed at the performance of the CLR.  Some people are absolutely baffled that managed code could be faster than native code, and the low-level reasons why have been blogged by people far smarter than I in the past.  Since someone just asked, A couple of the better-known reasons:

1) The managed heap rules:  If I say "object* foo = new object();" in C++, the OS looks around to find some memory it can give me.  CLR programs use a managed heap, however.  Despite the fact that calling "new()" is always expensive, the managed heap gives a huge advantage.  Instead of searching for free memory, the next chunk on the managed heap is returned immediately.  C developers writing games have used similar tricks for years, using malloc to get a big chunk of memory and managing bits of it themselves as needed.

2) JIT rules: C# is always JITified before execution.  JIT compiling turns your C# into machine code.  So what, you say, my C/C++ code is pre-compiled for the platform and doesn't pay the JIT penalty on application startup.  The advantage of the JIT is that it can be compiled each time the program is ran, and potentially take advantage of different situations and things specific not just to a processor architecture, but on each individual machine.  (I need to find a link to cite this appropriately) 

Anyway, read the article on Reggie's site, and thank him for the work he's doing.  Hey Reggie, when is that preview of Connector 5.3 come out?

In an article on Ars Technica, a lobbyist for the cable industry is quoted as saying that deregulation allows vendors to innovate faster and is a pro-consumer move.  The article’s author, however, cries that past evidence shows that deregulation has always brought higher prices to customers.  In addition, the absolutely abysmal customer service record of every major cable provider is pointed to as a need for government interference. 

I can personally provide a number of anecdotes to speak to the utterly shameful service and support I get from my own cable provider, but as is almost always the case when deregulation (free markets) is blamed for a supposedly undesirable effect, the ostensible deregulation is incomplete or tainted and therefore does not accomplish its aim. 

In the case of cable, consider the history.  Buried wire cable TV and Internet providers have had to deal with censorship and invasive oversight from the FCC and have been granted exclusive contracts by local and state governments.  These contracts usually take the form of the provider promising to build out the service to a high percentage of homes even if running wire there is not profitable and kick backs to the municipality in question in exchange for a guarantee that no competitors will be allowed to offer a comparable service in the same geographic area.  When Kyle McSlarrow says he wants deregulation, it would seem he wants to be free from any oversight, but of course keep the government’s barrier to any competition.

Removing any threat of competition, as well as allowing the cable provider to set their own prices, provides no incentive to offer good services at good rates and no incentive to help customers who are having trouble.  Right now, if I want better cable service, my only option is to move to someplace where a better provider is operating with their government-blessed monopoly.  Despite intense marketing spin to the contrary, Satellite is not an equivalent option in terms of bitrates, latency, and weather resiliency. Services such as Verizon’s FIOS and AT&T UVerse face an uphill regulatory battle at the State, Local, and Federal level as they seek permission to run fiber-optic wires into cities to compete with cable.

As usual the proponents of a Paternalistic State are quick to decry free markets as the cause of the issues that were in fact created with regulations.  If any company who wished to provide content was free to go out and negotiate with landowners to bury a transmission medium all the way up to individual homes, then we would see real deregulation.  Companies like Time Warner, Charter, AT&T, and Verizon would have to compete for the business of discerning consumers instead of competing for the favor of a small number of bureaucrats. Complete deregulation is the only sure way to drive innovation, bring down prices, and improve customer service.

Only complete and unconditional deregulation will set consumers free from high cable prices and bad service.

Larry Clarkin called me out in a question on software development going around the blogosphere.  Here are my answers.

How old were you when you started programming?

I was 11, we were living in a town of 600 people in southern Missouri.  I was very into arcade games and the few games we had for the PC which was an 8086.  My father, a very technical man but very cheap at the time, was loathe to shell out for a new video game.  At some point in a stroke of intuition, I realized those guys must create these games somehow. 

Damon: “Dad, if I can’t have a new game, I’ll make one.  How do those guys do that?”

Dad: “Oh, that’s with programming languages son”

Damon: “Do we have any of that?”

Dad: “Here’s the GW-Basic book that came with the PC”

I did the basic infinite loop printing my name, then learned the power of GOSUB and created a subroutine that would draw a spaceship and a subroutine that would shoot lightning bolts out of said spaceship.   I didn’t understand anything about how game worlds were animated though, the “tick” concept, and though that every on-screen object must be a Thread or something.  I left it alone until years later, living in Waukesha, my Dad brought home a Turbo Pascal compiler for our massively powerful 386. 

What was your first language?

GW-Basic, later Pascal

What was the first real program you wrote?

Well, the spaceship game was vaporware so I can’t say that one, but I did briefly experiment with audio on the 8086.  There was some kind of PlaySound(frequency, duration) function in GW-Basic, and I thought I’d need to write music for my eventual spaceship game.  I painstakingly assigned every letter of the alphabet a frequency inside a subroutine and checked the key stroke to see what letter was pressed.  I would type out various things that are not fit to print here in an attempt to see what words and phrases might make cool game music.  This program worked and met the intended scope.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

GW-Basic, Pascal, C, C++, Dephi, Q-Basic, Java, Javascript, VB.NET, C#

What was your first professional programming gig?

My internship of my Junior year in college ended up lasting through my Senior year, so nearly a year.  I was a C++ developer at Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation.  We were doing code on DB2 and Solaris of the kind JSP developers would soon become familiar with.

If you knew then what you know now, would have started programming?

Absoultely.  There’s few other things I could picture myself doing.  That sounds like a good blog post “What would you do if you couldn’t create software?”

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

I would tell them to take an interpersonal communication class, or to spend some time as a real professional consultant.  Many early times in my career I got in trouble, or nearly got in trouble, by being cocky or not recognizing when situations were politically charged.  Even if you just want to write code, you must be aware of these things.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had programming?

There are lots of small things along the way where things were fun for 6 months or so, but when I think about times I was most looking forward to going to work, it was actually (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) a project I did at Assurant health.  They forced me to use VB.Net which I hate, they gave us slow computers with mandatory virus scanning, and the schedule required heroics and a lot of cleaning up bad offshore code.  However, I had some excellent people to work with that I still stay in contact with years later.  I am now a client of The Clarkinator.  DeMilde, Terski, VanDyke, and others: it was a good time.

Who am I calling out?

Aaron Staves

David Snopek

Dan Vanderboom

Matt Terski

I had done the attendee party at TechEd 2005, and was completely blown away by it then.  I had no idea they’d actually bought out all of universal studios for 3-4 hours, with complimentary food and booze every 100 feet or so.  This led me to have the same expectations for this year’s party, which unfortunately was still cool, but not nearly as cool as 2005.  It seems half the park was rented out to another event, and that half happened to include the Mummy ride and some other cool stuff.  I think 2005’s party was longer than 8-11pm.  Still, complaining aside, it’s a very fun event: free drinks all over place tons of food including giant BBQ turkey legs this year (you’d have to see it…) and lots of stuff to do including Terminator, Jaws, Men in Black, etc. 

I got several bits of merchandise for my daughter and some Microsoft crawlers for my son. 

I did two very hard-core sessions on WPF today.  The first was with Tim Huckaby on WPF data visualization applications.  Some of the coolest WPF 3d that I’ve seen.  Oddly enough, he mentioned that the Scrips Research Institute had entered a patent last year that effective cures cancer.  The problem is that the host is killed 100% of the time too, but still very promising.

For the sub-genius line of business developer, WPF is the closest thing you can get to being paid to write video games without actually going back to C++ and slaving away in the video game industry.

Besides the formal sessions, one great aspect of TechEd is your ability to walk around the exhibition floor to talk with people from various teams at Microsoft.  I made it my mission to talk to as many people as possible.

·         ADO.Net Entity Framework:  Very cool.  The objects are not dumb CLR objects, but this MAY BE what I’ve been looking for.  I’ve always been a fan of the ORM and only once, in Java, did I have one (OJB) that I felt was the right mix of features and intrusiveness. I’m eagerly awaiting a production-ready MySQL EDM plugin.  In the mean while, to play with this, I think I’ll convert KlipschCorner.com to use this.  The programming model and LINQ queries felt very natural.

·         Visual Studio extensibility: there’s a World of Warcraft script plug-in for Visual Studio! 

·         ClickOnce: things are a lot better in SP1, but you still have issues with self-signed SSL certs and Internet+non NTLM authentication and of course keeping people from getting your bits if they shouldn’t have access.  It was good to see that people like Quicken and GoTo Meeting are using ClickOnce to deploy software over the Internet.

·         WPF: I met the principal architect behind XAML.  We looked at some amazing spatial data applications including:

o   Zurich airport: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2007/03/27/great-wpf-applications-13-z-rich-airport.aspx  

o   iZooFari: http://www.interknowlogy.com/Pages/iZooFari.aspx

·         ArcCast : Let’s just say there was some friendly arguments and teasing.  You know who you are.

·        Live Earth: The bird’s eye view 3d maps are freaking insane.

Ok, so, I found some great Silverlight tips on the afternoon of Day two courtesy of Jeff Prosise (http://www.wintellect.com/TechnicalBioDetail.aspx?Tech=5) .   I am definitely going to be taking his advice on some points and blogging about it as I convert my Beta 1 examples to Beta 2 examples.  Jeff had an implementation of The Game of Life in Silverlight that got me thinking about getting some Concurrency peanut butter into the Silverlight chocolate.  Would the LINQ based ray tracer work without too much modification in Silverlight?  Surely the Task Parallel Library will not work in Silverlight without serious modification and many things will likely not be available at all.  Still, I smell a side project: to what degree could we at least get Parallel.ForEach<> , Parallel.For, and perhaps some of the basic System.Threading.Tasks.Task things working in Silverlight 2.  Possible uses for this include a Silverlight based Folding @home style app and I’m sure there are others.

2008 TechEd MVP Party

I’m writing this on the morning after the 2008 MVP party, hosted in the Voodoo Room at the House of Blues in Orlando.  What a blast!  I showed up and realized that while I knew no one most other folks seemed to already know other MVPs.  Shortly thereafter Carl Franklin walked in the door.  Since I don’t get to meet Internet Famous people often, I said hi and thanked him for introducing me to Steely Dan with his rendition of Home at Last .  He seemed amused and gave me the big High Five when I said I actually bought Aja because of him. 

There were two guys there doing the whole Blues Brother s schtick.  It would seem not as many people came as RSVP’d, so I was able to call The Vanderboom and get him in to the party.  The lower attendance also meant that the free drink tickets flowed in a steady stream for all of us.  There are some pictures circulating of me swing-dancing with a woman who runs a user group in Seattle.  Hopefully no other incriminating evidence exists, everyone remaining when they kicked us out was getting wacky by that time. 

Thanks to Microsoft for putting this event on, and all the MVPs who came for a great time.

This morning’s session with Stephen Toub on the parallel extensions to the .net framework was excellent.  Stephen had a  quad-core laptop that was enormous and hotter than the surface of the sun.  Intel’s quad-core mobile chips for laptops should be out this summer.  Anyone want to buy a used Vostro with a Core2 Duo?  He also had an early prototype of a system based on the Intel Dunnington architecture that appeared to have 20 cores.  I suddenly felt that my Quad Core setup at home was hardly adequate to do real concurrency research.

I owe him several comments and I hope my notes are adequate to remember all of them.  I brought some more questions I didn’t ask yesterday.

Q: Stephen has stated that the goal is for developers to extend System.Threading.Tasks.Task in order to do concurrency at a lower level than Parallel.ForEach<>, yet Task has an internal constructor keeping you from extending it.

A: The PFX team realized this during their internal code reviews and this will be fixed in a future CTP.

Q: In the ray-tracing example, you can see one of the pitfalls of static partitioning of workload.  Compare the top of the image vs. the bottom.  In ray-tracing the objects and reflective surfaces make for much more intensive computations, and so the top of the screen draws very quickly while the bottom of the screen fills in rather slowly.  Is thought going into hinting semantics that would allow users of PFX to indicate that certain units of execution have a greater “weight” relative to others?  Would you handle this by changing priority of some Task threads so Windows gives it extra cycles, or changing the static partitioning algorithms?

A: With the current Task API, you can set the priority of a Task, which ultimately means thread priority.  There is design discussion going on related to how we might be able to give hints to the TPL.

I just got out of a “deep dive” on the Silverlight 2 rendering pipelines.  There were some good debugging hints I didn’t know about, but other than that the dive was not as technical as I’d hoped.  Right now I’m in a social networking session led by Rob Howard, and then on to more Silverlight.

Saw some more sessions last night, including one on data access layer encapsulation with the entity framework.  I need to dig into this more, maybe a hands on lab if I can find one.  It’s not clear from the examples how parent-child relationships are loaded by the entity framework and if both eager load and lazy load situations are supported.  I have such high hopes for the entity framework that there’s almost no way I won’t be disappointed on some front.  The only reason why I haven’t spent a day looking seriously at the bits in SP1 is because I’m mostly working on MySQL right now and the MySQL/.NET team has yet to produce EDM support.

I got an email from The Clarkin on Friday asking if I’d like a “Nice dinner on Microsoft”.  He wasn’t kidding and he is in fact my bestest friend forever for thinking of me.  Dan and I met a lot of Central region nerds at Charley’s Steak House and it was excellent.  I’m no Richard Campbell but I do tend to tend to get loud in a group, and I ended up giving an impromptu rundown of the French red wines from the menu, and we did a fair bit of sampling too, all courtesy of our excellent Evangelists from the Midwest. 

As I write this Stephen Toub’s Parallel Extensions talk is about to start.  I’m 100% full up on sessions until late tonight, and after that is the MVP party at the House of Blues, but I’ll try to sneak some more comments in today.

One thing I forgot to mention from the keynote this morning, and msftguy beat me to it.  Silverlight 2 Beta 2 will ship by the end of this week.  One thing Brian does not mention is that Somasegar claimed this version would have a go-live license.

Hopefully this means SL2 is nearly ready to ship.

My flight got in pretty late last night and after fixing a shampoo leak I went down for a few drinks with the Vanderboom.  Despite going to bed at 1:30am and getting up at 6am, I woke up more rested than the average night of Ethan waking up constantly.

The first item of business this morning was the Keynote with Bill Gates, in his last public speaking appearance as a full-time Microsoft employee.  The Keynote was an extended version of the “Bill’s last day” video with several high level presentations by other MSFT folks and a Q&A with Bill at the end.  The highlight of the show was the “Ballmer Bot”, a robot that rolled out onto stage screaming “Developers, developers, developers…”

My first session this morning was Steve Teixeira on the Parallel Computing platform.  He showed several brief PFX demonstrations on Stephen Toub’s Quad-core laptop.  Stephen was present in the audience.    I hung around for quite a long time after this session was over talking to Stephen.  I asked if anyone at Microsoft was thinking about tipping over the sacred cow of thread affinity, specifically as it relates to the Holy Gui Thread.  You know, all those WinForms and WPF objects that you cannot touch from any other thread.  This seems like a serious bottleneck in the age of Many-Core computing.  The example I gave was potentially performing the calculations for animations on other threads.  Apparently, WPF almost did not go the static-apartment route, but there were a laundry list of issues with the OS/Shell having some baggage that ultimately drove that team back to the old ways.  A lot of people at Microsoft are thinking about this though, so that’s a good thing.  We also talked briefly about managing dependencies between parallel tasks, the PFX team definitely intends for us to make our units of work inherit from Task.  Stephen thinks we should be able to use the new “ContinueWith” semantics in the June CTP to handle executing a task-tree. (http://www.damonpayne.com/2008/04/03/ManagingConcurrencyWithTrees0.aspx )  I will investigate this, though perhaps not until the plane ride home. 

My next Silverlight session was full, so I’m going to look for another session to round out the day.  The Vanderboom and I are having dinner with MSFT Central Region folks at a nice steak house later.  You’ve gotta love these events.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=348F73FD-593D-4B3C-B055-694C50D2B0F3&displaylang=en

The bits are out.  I plan on exploring this on the plane to TechEd tonight.  Here's the announcement:

http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam/archive/2008/06/02/8567802.aspx

and the current list of known issues:

http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam/archive/2008/06/02/8567816.aspx