Many thanks to Andy Westgarth and his team for organising a fantastic conference at the rather elegant Bradford University School of Management. Also, a big congratulations to all the delegates who gave up there free time to come and hear us speak and who were, in general, enthusiastic and asked some cracking questions to keep us speakers on our toes. For those who attended my Async my source code and presentation are now available on GitHub, https://github.com/westleyl... If ......

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As I wasn’t voted in with my nominated sessions I presented a 20/20 talk on the new async functionality coming with the .Net Framework. This was based on the PechaKucha presentation format, where you have only 20 slides with only 20 seconds per slide, and it progresses automatically. It was the first I’d attempted, so thanks to the organisers for allowing me to have a go. Although creating the slide deck was definitely easier than a one hour presentation, it was much more stressful giving the talk ......

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Here in the UK we recently had a long weekend due to a public holiday. So what better time to sit back in a comfy chair with the laptop and read the latest MSDN Magazine online? Unless you have children, of course, keeping them trapped in the house for three whole days would be a nightmare. So that means heading out and about on buses, trains and heading off to the Isleworth Spring Fayre. Now you can read the MSDN Magazine web site on a smartphone but on a 9cm screen it’s not ideal, and I don’t really ......

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Disclaimer Firstly, I must come clean, I work for a digital music company which is involved in digital music streaming and downloads. In no way are the views expressed are the views of the company for which I work. They are merely the subjective views of an atypical music consumer. I say atypical because despite being over 40, I seek out new bands on the radio, using listen again on 6Music and BBC Introducing programmes, such as Christian Carlisle’s excellent BBC Sheffield programme. I make an effort ......

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Many thanks to the audience in Sunderland for the great reaction to my talk on Commercial Software Development and getting into the spirit of the presentation. It was great to ask an audience if they'd been to meetings in the past week, then ask them to put their hands down if those meetings had agendas, and still see most of the hands stay up. Clearly we all still have work to do on eliminating such an atrocious waste of developer resource. I've uploaded the Powerpoint as a PDF with speaker notes ......

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A big thanks to my lively audience at the NxtGenUG Birmingham group tonight who provided excellent feedback. I enjoyed the live coding to try to explore the limits of the framework, even though it was interrupted by my PC turning itself off and leading me to thinking I'd trashed my SSD drive. You can find my presentation online at Prezi.com over here, and the source code for the demos is available here. During the presentation I mentioned there were some additional blogs and articles that are well ......

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A big thanks to my lively audience at the London .Net Users group last night who provided excellent feedback. They even led me to some live coding to discover how the TaskEx.WhenAny deals with the tasks which didn't complete first - apparently they are immeadiately disposed of and their results are lost. Let's hope the release documentation for the Async libraries makes this very clear. I also must thank EMC Consulting for providing the facilities and beer, and Adgistics for providing the pizza, ......

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Jon Skeet has started a new series of blogs on Async focussing on the underlying technology beneath the Async CTP and Async methods coming in C#5.0. http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon... Jon's blogs have a clear and deceptively easy to read style that belies the complex topics being discussed and is perfect for demystifying the technology behind Async so they are well worth the investment, and I'm looking forward to them hugely ......

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While I was away on a two week holiday in Morocco I notice that the Visual Studio team have dropped a very welcome SP1 refresh that means you can now play with the Async CTP with Visual Studio 2010 SP1. It also means you can program against ASP.NET MVC 3.0 and use the Aysnc CTP at the same time. Visual Studio Blog - SP1 refresh announcement - http://msdn.microsoft.com/e... Lucian Wischik's Blog - design changes - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/luc... ......

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Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans... mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; ......

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