More goodies from MS

My interest in software scalability and performance often leads me to Microsoft's Parallel Framework Extensions team BLOG, which recently published this great presentation from their parallelism tour...

 These slides is a must see item, really. They describe most of the goodies discussed on Channel 9 for a long time like:

• Application of PLINQ (more functional expressions!)
• Task definition, scheduling, stealing and exception handling
• Tool support

All this to be able to increase your CPU core utilisation, contributing to the increase of your application performance. Wonder, what is Java alternative here?

This lead me back to a bit neglected site of MS Labs and their new baby Reactive extensions for .NET. What a treat that is! If you thought, you knew about the possible applications of the Observer design pattern, you need to check it out.
Erik Meijer shows how observable collections can help to unify handling of the event driven UI with async calls to services. And how this uniformity can help with the cloud based application architecture. Duality and monads as base for RX can be found discussed in video by Erik and Brian Beckman. More functional world implementation in the imperative space :-)

Completely on the side, this time tool from Microsoft Live Labs. It is an intelligent Coolris on steroids. With my business intelligence background I can say it is another must see analytic app (called  Pivot), which helps to explore data visually with a true WOW factor.