Parallel FX is available as CTP

Yipee! They did it! The Parallel FX is available as CTP. It’s time to test it… - But hey I forgot something: i don’t own a Core 2 Duo or even quad core machine. Damn!

Anyway, forget about me and check it out! It’s an awesome technology and it has some really interesting algorithms running under the hood. The coolest thing is the “work stealing” idea where different tasks can steal work from other tasks when they have finished with their own work load. That helps to distribute the work load to the different cores and seems to scale very well and nicely.

Joe Duffy showed me the ray tracing example where he had also a feature to colorize the pixels depending in which task they were processed. It was very cool to see that stuff that is easy to compute was done in one single task (on one core) while the other stuff got split up to different tasks (and cores).

Have fun!

Meet the Microsoft Student Partner girls

At the TechEd’s Microsoft Student Partner evening Will and I were lucky to interview some of the women in the program (if you study computer science you might know how few women are studying with you).

Kateryna Drobotko (from Ukraine), Susana Vilaca (from Portugal) and Diana Tataran (from Romania) talk about their passion for technology and why they joined the Microsoft Student Partner program. We spoke also about what they enjoyed at TechEd and what they are studying on their home universities.

It was very interesting to see why these girls enjoy working with technology and what makes them passionate about it!

Check it out!

Don Syme and Joe Duffy on F# and Parallel FX

At Teched I had the chance to speak with Don Syme (the creator of F#) and Joe Duffy (he used to work in the BCL team and did some of the threading classes in there) about the ideas behind F# and what is coming up with the Parallel Framework for .NET. We spoke about the both because they overlap in the area on how to make code leverage the power of the multicore CPUs.

Don spoke also about what they do at Microsoft Research Cambridge and how to apply for an internship there.

Check it out!

David Platt and why software sucks!

Will and I had the chance to interview David Platt at the TechEd Developer Barcelona. He’s the author of the book with the title “Why software sucks” and professor at the Harvard University Extension School.

We spoke about why software is as it is right now and why it is to complicated for most users. David tells us also that the users shouldn’t care about how software works, they should be able to use it without knowing the internals!

Tune in, if you want to know what the common problems are that users encounter when they use the today’s software.

Check it out!

XNA Studio 2.0 BETA is here

This week is a really busy week so far. A lot of new stuff to play with is coming out right now. Today the XNA team has released the first BETA version of XNA Studio 2.0.

What’s new?
They support the full version of Visual Studio 2005 (no 2008, I don’t know why they are still on Visual Studio 2005). It’s cool to have at least the support for the full version because you don’t need to install an Express Edition if you got the full version, for example, via MSDN AA.

They added also network support to XNA. You can finally play your games against other people over the network.

A list with all the new features can be found here.

Experience student life in Australia! He started something :)

A month ago I have been at the Melbourne University. I don’t want spoil to much but it was like living in a Harry Potter movie (speaking of the housing).

Ed Hooper (an MSP from Australia), Dimaz Pramudya (another MSP who is studying as foreign student in Australia) and Long Zheng (you probably know him from his blog) showed me the campus and we talked about the Microsoft Student Partner program, Long’s blog and studying in Australia.

If you ever wanted to study in Australia you should definitively tune in and listen to what Ed and the other guys tell us about that!

Check it out!

Webcast on how LINQ expressions work internally

I have done a short screencast that is explaining how LINQ works internally. I think most people are scared when they see Lambda expressions and I tried to explain why they look as they look, what they actually do and that they are very similar to normal delegate calls.

Tune in, if you are interested in how LINQ is working internally and what happens internally when you write the LINQ expressions into the IDE editor.

Stephen Forte on Web 2.0 and SOA

The first video featuring Will and me is online now. Stephen is a great guy, he’s really enjoying what he does and it was really cool to chat with him!

That’s what Will wrote on Channel 8 about the video:
Christian and I were lucky enough to chat with Stephen Forte (Microsoft Regional Director for the NY Metro region) at TechEd Developers in Barcelona last week. We talked with him about his experiences being a judge at the first Imagine Cup and some of the great new technologies available to this year’s entrants including ASP.Net Ajax and SQL Server 2008. Stephen also offers some great advice on entering the world of business and his take on the Service Oriented revolution.

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