Well, we had the very first .Net Dojo last Thursday with Ben Scheirman presenting on ASP.NET MVC. Overall, the event was a major success; feedback from attendees was overwhelmingly positive. It was my feeling that this type of event would be pretty popular and I’m glad to see that this was the case.

I’d like to thank Sogeti for sponsoring the event and making sure that everyone had plenty of sugar and caffeine to keep them going through the afternoon. And I’d also like to thank them for their support Ben’s involvement in this event.

We will be doing more of these … due to room availability constraints, the next one will be in October. I’ll be announcing it once the details get finalized. Make sure that you subscribe here to get news of the next one … I’m sure that it will fill up very quickly, just as this past one did.

If you would like to download the sample code and presentation, you can find it here.

It’s a full day of tech … what’s not to love?

The morning is the ArcReady event … this is geared towards architects and senior developers that are moving into or want to move into an architect role. There’s less code but more best practices and patterns using all the latest technologies to build awesome, scalable and robust applications on the Microsoft platform. Yes, folks, there is to building applications than just writing code … architecture is vitally important with any successful application (but you knew that already, right?). There will be two sessions in the next ArcReady:

Session 1: Blueprints for Success. In this session, we will survey the modern architecture landscape from the ground up, including infrastructure, application, and client solution choices. We’ll discuss how current industry trends are shaping our architectures and present an innovative architecture mapping technique for analyzing our customer’s needs and aligning them to today’s technologies and solution patterns.
Session 2: Making It Real. In this session, we’ll take a look at several case studies to learn how to apply the mapping technique from Session 1 to architect real world solutions that add true business value. We’ll examine applications we use every day and take a walk through a Microsoft reference architecture that explores many of the decisions we face when building modern distributed applications.

Here are the dates:

Dallas – 9/23/08
Houston – 9/24/08
Austin – 9/25/08

You can register for this (and see other cities, too, in case you’re out of town and still want to go!) at www.arcready.com.

After that, from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM we’ll have “MSDN Unleashed” … developer/code focused stuff. Here’s are the two sessions for that:

Session 1: Demystifying WPF

Today’s applications need to do more than simply work. They need to draw in the user, and provide a differentiated experience. This means moving beyond battleship gray forms, boxy UIs, and providing a positive user experience. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides powerful capabilities to develop a compelling user interface, the kind that makes an application stand out. In this session, we’ll examine the core concepts of WPF such as layout panels, data binding, styles and control templates, and we’ll use them to develop an application UI from the ground up.

Session 2: Developing Applications with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1

Service Pack 1 and Visual Studio 2008 introduce a wide variety of new features for targeting Windows, Office and the Web. This includes more controls, a streamlined setup, improved startup performance, fresh graphics features, improved AJAX support, and much more. We’re also introducing the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services, which are designed to simplify application data access by providing an extensible, conceptual model for data from any source, while enabling this model to closely reflect business requirements. Don’t miss this lively session and learn how to use these powerful new features in your applications.

Same dates, same location but different registration links. Here they are:

Dallas
Houston
Austin

Well, I gotta say … the very first .Net Dojo looks like it’s going to be a resounding success. The interest has been such that we are already filled up. Yes, it’s true … 2 weeks before the event and it’s already full. There is a waitlist, but at 75 registered folks, we’re already approaching the limit that I feel comfortable with. :-(

I’m currently looking to get the next one planned for September … stay tuned here for when it’s announced …

I think the title says enough … so now it’s time to GO GET IT!!! You can find details of what’s in it here.

I’m up in Seattle right now at TechReady, an internal Microsoft conference with technical presentations and information for folks in the field (like me, of course). So … with that said, there will likely be the occasional post this week about something that I’ve seen up here that I can actually talk about.

The first thing is the parallel extensions to .Net. You can get a preview of these at the MSDN Parallel Computing Center. Keep in mind that it’s a CTP (that’s lower on the food chain than an official Beta) – and an early CTP at that – so there will be bugs and the performance won’t be as good as the final, RTM release. Also, be forewarned: the API may (OK, let’s be honest, it will) change before the RTM release. Still, it’s a good thing to play with because it gives you a good idea of where we’re going to enable developers to make traditional very hard things easy.

The hard thing that the parallel extensions address is multi-threading where concurrency between threads is required. Doing this right is actually a pretty significant undertaking and it’s really, really easy to get yourself all messed up and tied up in knots. And multi-threaded code has some additional challenges when it comes to debugging. Then there is the issue related to dividing the work to be done up among the different threads.

In the days of single core processors, where most applications weren’t running on multi-proc boxes, multi-threading was something that could help with UI responsiveness, but let’s be honest … work wasn’t really done concurrently. Sure, Windows would schedule your threads at different times and in some cases you could actually get somewhat better performance than if you used a single thread, but you didn’t nearly have the number of issues (and the challenges) that you have with multi-core processors. And in this day and age, multi-core processors have become very much the mainstream, entry level processor. I just looked at a Major Computer Manufacturer’s website and found that only the very, very lowest end systems had single core processors … and a dual core desktop could be had for as little as $359 (sans monitor, of course). Intel has dual-core Celerons (their “value” processors). And, of course, triple-cores (from AMD) and quad-cores are available … and I saw a desktop with quad-core for as low as $729. If, like me, you build your own systems from parts, a dual-core processor can be found for around $50 and a quad-core can be found for about $175. Eight-core processors aren’t going to be too far down the road (octo-core?) and I really doubt that it’ll stop there. Oh, and lest I forget, Intel’s HyperThreading technology looks (and in many ways acts) like multiple cores.

In order to take full advantage of this powerful hardware, developers need to rethink some of things that we’ve traditionally done with an eye towards multi-threading and parallel processing. It is a huge change to much of what we’ve done for years and it sometimes hurts the brain to try to follow the way the code executes … a single line of code could be executing on, say, 4 different threads literally at the same time. Yes, the Windows scheduler is still involved scheduling the threads for execution but now it’s got 2, 3 or 4 processors to execute the threads on. It’s not just appearances anymore. The parallel extensions to .Net make this dirt simple (I like dirt simple). It can be as simple as adding AsParallel() to a Linq query. Or use Parallel.ForEach() rather than a traditional for … each loop.

The demo that was showed did a couple of different operations (find, sum, etc) and compared the performance of the parallel with the non-parallel version of the same code. Even now, in the CTP, where the performance tuning hasn’t been done to any real extent, there was an improvement of 3-4 times. Pretty impressive.