Bart De Smet, Microsoft

Bart De Smet is a Software Development Engineer on the Cloud Programmability team, an avid blogger and a popular speaker on various international conferences. In his current role, he’s actively involved in the design and implementation of Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) and on an extended “LINQ to Anything” mission. His main interests include programming languages, runtimes, functional programming, and all sorts of theoretical foundations. Before joining the company, Bart was a C# MVP for four years, while completing his Master of Civil Engineering and Computer Science studies at Ghent University, Belgium.

Presentation: "Rx: your prescription to cure asynchronous programming blues"

Track: .NET State of the Art

Time: Friday 14:05 - 15:05

Location: Henry Moore Room, Fourth Floor

Abstract:

Asynchronous, event-driven "reactive" programming is way too hard in today's world of development tools and frameworks. The huge amount of manual and error-prone plumbing leads to incomprehensible and hard to maintain code. As we reach out to services in the cloud, the desire for asynchronous computation is ever increasing, requiring a fresh look on the problems imposed by reactive programming.

Centered around the concept of observable data sources, Rx provides a framework that takes care of the hard parts of reactive programming. Instead of focusing on the hard parts, you now can start dreaming about the endless possibilities of composing queries over asynchronous data sources, piggybacking on convenient LINQ syntax. In this session, we'll cover the design philosophy of Rx, rooted on the deep duality between the interactive IEnumerable interface and the new reactive IObservable interface in .NET 4. From this core understanding, we'll start looking at various combinators and operators defined over observable collections, as provided by Rx, driving concepts home by a bunch of samples.

Finally, we’ll have a look at recent work done on the field of integration with the new C# 5.0 and VB 11.0 “async” features, including support for the “await” pattern and the IAsyncEnumerable interface. Democratizing asynchronous programming starts today. Don't miss out on it!

Presentation: "LINQ, take two – realizing the LINQ to Everything dream"

Track: .NET State of the Art

Time: Friday 16:50 - 17:50

Location: Henry Moore Room, Fourth Floor

Abstract:

At PDC a few years back, we introduced the LINQ project to solve the impedance mismatch between various data models by means of integrated query syntax in mainstream programming languages. Today, we’re seeing a rich ecosystem around LINQ providers that allow developers to reach out to many more data models. However, there’s a lot of opportunity left to democratize even more data models. Based on the theory of monads, we’ll explore the incredibly powerful nature of query comprehensions to do things like theorem solving, build reactive queries (cf. Reactive Extensions for .NET), carry out various forms of query optimization, split execution of queries across tiers, etc. In addition, we revisit the art of writing query providers, introducing some novel approaches to ensure better compile-time checking. After this talk, you’ll truly understand the (underestimated) power that LINQ has brought us. Be prepared to be amazed!