Programming

ECMA C# and Common Language Infrastructure Standards

Devin A. Rychetnik — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 21:34:34 GMT

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/aa569283.aspx
(It has links to things such as the C# language specification and a reference guide to the CIL Instruction Set).

Performance Matters

Devin A. Rychetnik — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 02:38:03 GMT

A few good write-ups on performance:

http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v7i24_fallacy.html

http://www.panopticoncentral.net/articles/946.aspx

WCF NetTcpBinding Lessons Learned

Devin A. Rychetnik — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 04:43:28 GMT

I just got done with a long afternoon of implementing a Windows Service to self-host my WCF service. It was a bit trickier than I thought it would be so if I can save you the headache I'll be happy.

A good place to start is by reading these two MSDN articles:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/02/WindowsCommunicationFoundation/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/06/ServiceStation/

Next, you'll want to understand these support articles:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733768.aspx (I needed this to get the wsdl stuff working)

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733925.aspx (need to do this before TcpNetBinding will work)

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms731758.aspx (an example app hosting WCF)

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms750530.aspx (more on self-hosting)

Message Queues in .NET

Devin A. Rychetnik — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 02:45:04 GMT

A nice little article on leveraging MSMQ in .NET: http://www.builderau.com.au/program/dotnet/soa/Using-message-queue-services-in-NET/0,339028399,339274877,00.htm

Scalable Apps with Asynchronous Programming in ASP.NET

Devin A. Rychetnik — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 07:56:00 GMT

If asynchronous programming in ASP.NET is something you haven't been doing, then you'll want to check this article out: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/03/WickedCode/. Instead of spending more $ on new servers or hardware you might be able to utilize async Pages, Handlers, and Modules to lessen the amount of threads waiting to execute.

Custom Iterators, Predicates, and Generic Methods in .NET

Devin A. Rychetnik — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 07:28:00 GMT

This article proposes some great ways of making common sequences of operations on lists more reusable in .NET: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/bb264519.aspx. It reminds me of some of the built-in set operations that are available in the SmallTalk programming language.

Thread Synchronization in Windows Vista

Devin A. Rychetnik — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:27:00 GMT

Here is a useful article containing an overview of the new simplified thread synchronization capabilities in Windows Vista: http://www.codeguru.com/columns/kate/article.php/c13387/. These include CONDITION_VARIABLE, AcquireSRWLockExclusive/ReleaseSRWLockExclusive, and AcquireSRWLockShared/ReleaseSRWLockShared.

Compression and Decompression in .NET

Devin A. Rychetnik — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 20:52:00 GMT

I came across this simple, but useful article demonstrating how to use the built-in .NET GZip compression/decompression capabilities. It also mentioned this SharpLibZip open-source compression/decompression library that would allow you to open the file easily using WinZip.

UPDATE: forgot to post the article link (whoops!) http://www.codeguru.com/csharp/.net/net_data/sortinganditerating/article.php/c13375/

Events & Delegates in .NET

Devin A. Rychetnik — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 22:32:00 GMT

A decent article on Events and Delegates in .NET: http://www.codeguru.com/csharp/.net/net_general/eventsanddelegates/article.php/c12933/.

Concurrency and Coordination Runtime, Using Concurrency for Scalability

Devin A. Rychetnik — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 09:35:00 GMT

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/09/ConcurrentAffairs/default.aspx
Jeffrey Richter describes how to use the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR), a lightweight distributed services-oriented architecture and a common language runtime (CLR)-based library included in the Microsoft Robotics Studio toolkit.

"The CCR library is a managed DLL that greatly simplifies these tasks for the programmer. The CCR offers a number of classes allowing developers a simple object model that they can use to easily express complex coordination patterns for dealing with completed I/O operations. Furthermore, the CCR offers its own high-performance thread pool you can use to execute tasks in response to completed I/O. The thread pool offers phenomenal scalability and will maximize concurrency within your application. When you couple the CCR with some of the new C# language features (such as anonymous methods and iterators), you get a developer's dream come true: an easy way to write responsive and scalable applications."

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/09/CLRInsideOut/default.aspx
Joe Duffy provides some background to the present day situation that software is facing with the major advances in hardware moving to multi-core. He explains a few different parallelism techniques and concurrency concepts that are useful to consider when writing scalable and performant apps.