DevDays 2010 Guest Blog Post: Bart De Smet
It was great to have Bart over for DevDays this year all the way from Redmond. We all enjoyed his excellent presentations and quirky sense of humour. In his own words:
Hi there, I’m Bart De Smet, working at Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, WA, USA in the SQL Cloud Data Programmability team, where I’m currently working on the Reactive Extensions to .NET (Rx) and more future-looking LINQ-related stuff. Stay tuned to hear more, e.g. by following my blog at https://blogs.bartdesmet.net/bart.
It’s always a pleasure for me to visit South Africa and talk to a very enthusiastic and engaged audience about our newest technologies. In addition to the speaking engagements, I really love browsing cities like Cape Town (thanks to the local Microsoft folks being fantastic tourist guides) and getting in touch with people for (mostly technical) discussions.
At DevDays I presented 3 sessions:
In Core .NET Framework 4.0 Enhancements we look at various features at the runtime and base class library level introduced in .NET 4. While the big theme is better accommodation for various new kinds of languages (like functional and dynamic), there are some other themes like debugging, concurrency, etc. as well.
Download the demonstration code and watch the session recording.For Language Enhancements in .NET 4.0 the emphasis is on new language features mostly focused on dynamic dispatch using the new "dynamic" keyword allowing one to reach out to dynamic languages like IronPython, improvements to COM interop thanks to named and optional parameters and the no-PIA initiative, and finally a short word on generic co- and contravariance.
Download the demonstration code and watch the session recording.During my talk on the Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx), the audience gets introduced to this new framework that we currently ship on MSDN DevLabs. It provides the glue to write asynchronous event-driven reactive programs in an easier manner, thanks to viewing events as observable collections, providing query and other operators over those.
You can find demonstration code on my blog.
Thanks Bart for making the long journey over here and we hope you enjoyed your stay in South Africa.