(As usual, I will be sending the publisher a copy of this review to give them and the author a chance to reply to it before I publish it to the blog. Other than including their comments and correcting any factual mistakes they may point out, I don't intend to change the review itself.) Resources: Publisher page (includes source code download) Amazon / Barnes and Noble My unofficial errata and notes A more positive series of review blog posts (just for balance) Introduction and disclaime[...]

In the last post I showed a method to implement "majority voting" for tasks, allowing a result to become available as soon as possible. At the end, I mentioned that I was reasonably confident that it worked because of the unit tests... but I didn't show the tests themselves. I felt they deserved their own post, as there's a bigger point here: it's possible to unit test async code. At least sometimes. Testing code involving asynchrony is generally a pain. Introducing the exact order of events that you want[...]

Note: For the rest of this series, I'll be veering away from the original purpose of the project (investigating what the compiler is up to) in favour of discussing the feature itself. As such, I've added a requirement for AsyncCtpLib.dll - but due to potential distribution restrictions, I've felt it safest not to include that in the source repository. If you're running this code yourself, you'll need to copy the DLL from your installation location into the Eduasync\lib directory before it will build - or c[...]

Ages ago when I wrote my previous Eduasync post, I said we'd look at a pipeline model of coroutines. I've decided to skip that, as I do want to cover the topic of this post, and I've got some more "normal" async ideas to write about too. If you want to look at the pipeline coroutines code, it's project 20 in the source repository. Have fun, and don't blame me if you get confused reading it - so do I. The code I am going to write about is horrible too. It's almost as tricky to understand, and it does far n[...]

EDIT, 17th October 2011: Last week Kobalt closed down... so the choice about whether or not I'd buy from them again is now moot. However, PC Specialist sells a very similar spec, now including the matte screen... As some of you will know, our house was burgled in April, and the thieves took three laptops (and very little else), including my main personal laptop. Obviously I ordered a replacement, partly covered by the insurance from my old laptop. However, I took the opportunity to spoil myself a little..[...]