Today's post involves the MagicOrdering project in source control (project 28). When I wrote part 16 of Eduasync, showing composition in the form of majority voting, one reader mailed me a really interesting suggestion. We don't really need to wait for any of the tasks to complete on each iteration of the loop - we only need to wait for the next task to complete. Now that sounds impossible - sure, it's great if we know the completion order of the tasks, but half the point of asynchrony is that many things[...]

As previously mentioned, at CodeMash 2012 I gave a very silly Pecha Kucha talk entitled "Coding in the style of Glee". The video is on YouTube, or can be seen embedded below: (There's also another YouTube video from a different angle.) This post gives the 20 slides (which were just text; no fancy pictures unlike my competitors) and what I meant to say about them. (Edited very slightly to remove a couple of CodeMash-specific in-jokes.) Don't forget that each slide was only up for 20 seconds. Coding in t[...]

I'm nearly home - on a bus back from Heathrow airport to Reading - returning from CodeMash 2012. This was my first US conference, and I had a wonderful time. It was pretty densely packed in terms of presenting / recording for me: I presented two back-to-back sessions jointly with Bill Wagner, on async. These went down really well (particularly Bill's genius idea of using the Doctor Who quote about time being a "big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff") and were great fun to give. Bill's a class ac[...]

In preparation for CodeMash, I've been writing some more async code and decompiling it with Reflector. This time I'm using the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview - the version which installs alongside Visual Studio 2010 under Windows 7. (Don't ask me about any other features of Visual Studio 11 - I haven't explored it thoroughly; I've really only used it for the C# 5 bits.) There have been quite a few changes since the CTP - they're not visible changes in terms of code that you'd normally write, but the s[...]

Happy New Year, everyone! I'm attempting to make 2012 a quiet year in terms of my speaking engagements - I've turned down a few kind offers already, and I expect to do so again during the year. I may well still give user group talks in evenings if I can do so without having to take holiday, but full conferences are likely to be out, especially international ones. This is partly so I can take more time off to support my wife, Holly, who has her own books to promote. This year will be particularly important[...]