As promised, I am releasing my Parallel xUnit solution built on top of the Task Parallel Library.  Last year I released partial code for a solution built on top of my own thread pool.  I updated the solution for xUnit 1.1 and used the previous CTP of the Parallel Extensions for .NET; the code should also work with the recently released .NET 4/VS 2010 beta. 

As shown in my Parallel Extensions talk at the FVNUG Day of .NET, the unit of parallelism here is the class.  Enjoy, and please send me any comments.

Download xunit 1.1 with parallel test runner

For me, the Mix it Up! Tour is over.  Chicago (qua spectator), Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Madison, Appleton (also doing a Parallel Extensions talk at the Fox Valley Day of .NET) , and Eau Claire.  I wish the other folks who are still finishing up some tour dates good luck and I hope they make the necessary bad jokes during my TastingProject.com demo code.

I can now return to my regularly scheduled tech blogging.  I’ve got a lot of incubating things that need to be blogged about as well as posting some code related to the Mix it Up! Tour.

Time to rock out some .NET 4 and blog about it.

The Fox Valley .NET user’s group has posted a hand-out for the two sessions I’m doing this Saturday.  Cool!

http://fvnug.org/dnn/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=ZGv%2fajN89eU%3d&tabid=36

{Edit: Here's the schedule of events too. http://fvnug.org/dnn/DayOfNet/Schedule/tabid/62/Default.aspx. I hope to see familiar faces there tomorrow.}

The next two stops on the Mix it Up! tour are quickly approaching.  My talk to the Wisconsin .NET Users Group (metro Milwaukee area) has been moved up to this coming Tuesday, May 5th. You can find details on how to register and where to go here.

The following night, Wednesday, May 6th, I will be in Madison.  You can find details on this talk here.

I hope to see you there!

This post is coming to you from my new Mobile Workstation.  Having seen The Vanderboom’s Alienware M17 I knew something similar would be my next laptop but I wasn’t ready to purchase.  My wife’s venerable Tablet PC dying initiated a chain of hand-me-downs ending in me getting a maxed-out M17.  This thing is definitely the nicest laptop I’ve ever owned, and is barely any larger than the Dell Vostro it replaces.

• Vista Ultimate x64
• 17” 1900x1200 screen
• Core 2 Extreme Quad 2.53ghz
• 4GB RAM
• 7200RPM drive
• Blu-ray drive

About the only thing I didn’t upgrade is to get the solid state drive.  When prices come down I’ll upgrade that.

I went for a quad core rather than the fastest dual core in order to help keep forcing myself to think in terms of parallelism when I need a speed increase.  I also have a long-incubating Parallel Programming in .NET talk that I’ve held off on giving publicly because, well, the examples are just plain not that inspiring without at least four cores in my opinion. 

I’m giving the keynote at the Fox Valley Day of .NET next month, but they had some extra session slots.  It looks like my talk on the Parallel Extensions to .NET has been accepted for this conference, so me and my new Alienware pal will be there in style crunching data and graphics.

Also, the keyboard glows.

Last night I did my first stop on the Mix it Up! tour: the Indy NDA group in Indianapolis, IN.  These guys have got it made.  They have an absolutely fantastic group of people, a great location, and a TON of swag at every meeting.  I was pleased to be bringing some t-shirts and copies of Expression Studio only to show up abd find 20 books, a webcam, and various other nice prices already on the swag table.

These guys are hard-core too:  Their attendance is 120 people and up for every event, and they hold various SIG groups right after the main user group meeting.  After I did the Mix it up content they invited me into their Architecture SIG meeting to discuss the MVC pattern and we ended up talking about map reduce and the Parallel Extensions for the .net framework.  Thanks, guys, for having me, and maybe I’ll be back again.

I keep meaning to blog about movie nights so people in the area can be informed and so I can keep a history.  Tomorrow’s movie night is King Kong in glorious high definition. 

04.03.2009 8PM – Contact me for details.

Now, bear witness to my poor photography and composition skills and burn the movie night splash logo into your retinas:

I’ve really got to take some better photos.

The What:

A whole lot of goodness was announced at MIX09.  Many of us were unable to attend.  Larry Clarkin and Dave Bost of Microsoft decided to locate some dedicated Web/RIA geeks in the Midwest region to bring an ultra-condensed version of the MIX09 announcements to user groups, conferences, and code camps.  While the level of detail won’t equal what you would have gotten by going to MIX09, we can hopefully get you excited about what’s coming up and answer some of your questions. 

The Who:

Corey Miller

Anthony Handley

Damon Payne

Josh Holmes

Larry Clarkin

The When:

• 4/1 CD2UG (Corey Miller / Anthony Handley) – The first stop, I’ll be heading down to Chicago tomorrow to provide moral support and take notes on how things flow.
• 4/9 Indianapolis, IN (Damon Payne)
• 4/15 CNUG (Corey Miller/ Anthony Handley/ Josh Holmes)
• 4/30 Lake County (Anthony Handley)
• 5/6 Madison, WI (Damon Payne)
• 5/8 RIAPalooza (Anthony Handley)
• 5/9 Fox Valley Day of .NET (Damon Payne/ Larry Clarkin) – This is a day long conference, and our presentation will serve as the keynote for this event!
• 5/12 Milwaukee (Damon Payne)
• 5/12 Ft Wayne, IN (Corey Miller)
• 5/14 Chippewa Falls, WI (Damon Payne) – hopefully I can be forgiven for looking forward to this date most of all.  Doug has promised to book the Leine Lodge for this presentation.  Beer + Silverlight = shangri-la
• 5/16 Indy Code Camp (Josh Holmes)
• 5/19 South Bend, IN (Corey Miller)
• 5/26 Rockford, Il (Josh Holmes)
• 5/30 Chicago Code Camp (Josh Holmes – possibly others?)

See you there!

While there are some things I will be tweaking based on testing and shifting sales feedback I’m between gigs as of today.  Businesses are loathe to spend money right now.  I’ve got some “real work” to finish up, the Mix it Up! tour and then hopefully I can make a giant dent in my very large personal backlog.  Assuming I’ve got roughly a month, I wonder how much I can get done?  My home office is definitely my most productive location…

• New server: I’m moving my Discountasp.net sites over to a dedicated server.  I haven’t been doing too much “sysadmin” tasks of late and this will force me to come up to speed on IIS7 and Server 2008.  DamonPayne.com should be a lot faster next week.  I’m going to throw Visual SVN up on this bad boy so I can take my various side projects with me everywhere.
• Sharepoint: I’ll eventually be throwing Sharepoint up on this server, forcing me to come up to speed on Sharepoint 2007.
• AGT: The Argentum Tela project has atrophied somewhat as I diverted time to code contests and billable work.  I really need to get back into this so I can finish it and then start working on the Silverlight 3 port.  A WPF port is also in the mix.
• TastingProject.com – I’ve long been talking in my personal circles about my “social networking for wine lovers” effort.  This will be outrageously cool.  I am also using this site as a mechanism to evaluate the recently release Asp.Net MVC effort and get my head back into the CSS universe, much as I hate it.
• Computer rebuild: I’ll never buy an nForce chipset board again.  My workstation mobo has slowly deteriorated to the point of hilarity, occasionally to the point where Vista tells me the BIOS is not ACPI complaint.  I’m rebuilding with a good ole Intel board and moving up to 8GB of RAM while I’m at it.
• Parallel extensions: I’ve got a couple of shelved Parallel Extensions articles I need to bring out.  One revisits the task trees concept and the other deals with databases.
• SQL Server 2008 – as part of the parallel extensions work and general geeky curiosity I’ll be evaluating SQL Server 2008 once I rebuild my system.
• Top secret HandWaver product.  I’m pretty sure I can pull of the technology.  If I can also craft a marketing message that communicates the coolness to the target audience it will be a miracle.

My goal is to spend about 50 hours a week on all of these things, working from home and various co-work spots, and get a huge chunk of backlog done while also doing whatever networking is needed in order to get billable again.

Obviously a lot of big things were announced at MIX 2009 yesterday.  I maintain my position that I would like to see Silverlight go towards more parity with WPF than ASP.Net, but there’s plenty to be happy about here.  I am most interested in the low-level details on the Bitmap APIs, perspective 3D, and the new tool bundled in with Blend 3. 

MIX it UP!

If, like me, you missed MIX because you couldn’t spare the time or expense, we have a consolation prize to offer you.  Larry Clarkin has organized a cabal of Silverlight-loving speakers in the Midwest with the mission to bring the presentations from MIX2009 to your local User Group, Code Camp, or other community event.  The “MIX it up” tour may already be planning on visiting your user group in MN, WI, IL, or IN.  I myself will be talking at about four stops on the MIX it Up! tour.  Look for more details and dates soon.