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

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!

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Bart De Smet, Microsoft

 Bart De  Smet
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.