Community developer blogs

Daniel Moth

Recent Posts

• Updated Beta1 slides for parallelism

  Posted: 03 Jul 2009 at 08:56 by The Moth

  For those of you interested in my session on parallelism with VS2010, I gave an extended/longer version of it recently and included a bunch of new slides and updated the existing ones to match the recent release of VS2010 Beta1. Get the updated pptx here (checkout the annotated slides 16 and 17 on Parallel Tasks and Parallel Stacks). Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

• Debug .NET dumps with VS2010

  Posted: 03 Jul 2009 at 08:45 by The Moth

  Tess has written a great post on debugging .NET dumps in Visual Studio 2010 (which also briefly touches on the Parallel Stacks window ;-) Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

• yearsOnThisPlanet++

  Posted: 03 Jul 2009 at 08:39 by The Moth

  Today I am one year older (but not wiser ;-). This time last year I got an SSN and had almost no friends in the USA, while this year I've booked a bar to host the many cool people I've met here. If you are in Seattle and coming to my party, it's gonna be messy so come prepared ;-) Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

• Parallelism in VS2010 at Illinois next week...

  Posted: 20 Jun 2009 at 20:52 by The Moth

  The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is holding what seems like a fantastic week-long summer course on multi-core programming. They have invited me to give a session (or what they term on that page a "special lecture") on Parallel Programming in Visual Studio 2010! All I have to do this weekend is prepare that lecture :-) On a personal note, I've never been to that part of the USA, so I'll spend a couple days in Chicago finding out if all the rumors (good and bad) are true…

• Parallel Stacks and Parallel Tasks screencasts

  Posted: 18 Jun 2009 at 06:52 by The Moth

  Whether you have read or not my blog posts on the new Visual Studio 2010 debugger windows, you now have the option of seeing them in action in these videos I published on channel9: 17-minute screencast on Parallel Stacks and 14-minute screencast on Parallel Tasks. If you don't like watching videos and you don't like reading about features, maybe you prefer the guided hands on approach. Launch your VS2010 instance and go through my walkthrough published on MSDN.

• Parallel Stacks – Method View

  Posted: 07 Jun 2009 at 05:24 by The Moth

  The new Parallel Stacks window has a special feature (that applies to both Threads View and Tasks View) that we call Method View. It is accessible from the toolbar and it acts on the current stack frame (i.e. the only one with a green arrow icon or, in the absence of that, the one with the yellow arrow). It takes that method and pivots the diagram on it, coalescing all occurrences of that method into a single node in the center, clearly showing the callees and the callers.

• Parallel Stacks – Tasks view

  Posted: 28 May 2009 at 06:12 by The Moth

  This blog post presumes you read my posts on Parallel Tasks and on Parallel Stacks, which describe the usefulness of the new VS2010 debugger windows for debugging multithreaded applications. In today's post I'll expand on the task-specific support in the Parallel Stacks window: we call this the Tasks View of the Parallel Stacks window and you can switch to that view from the combobox in the toolbar. Threads versus Tasks

• Parallel Stacks – another new VS2010 debugger window

  Posted: 21 May 2009 at 03:19 by The Moth

  Assumed knowledge aka Background Reading It is important to understand some of the existing Call Stack window features. Even if you don't care about this VS2010 feature, you can improve your debugging skills with any version of Visual Studio by reading that blog post. Parallel Stacks debugger toolwindow With applications increasingly having more than one thread and with parallelism gaining momentum, we need the ability to view (and navigate) more than 1 call stack from a single view.

• VS2010 fix for "not all anonymous methods are the same"

  Posted: 20 May 2009 at 02:56 by The Moth

  Last September (wow, time flies!) I blogged about a VS2008 issue described as: Not all AnonymousMethods are the same. My team fixed this, so let's revisit the equivalent code from that post, this time in VS2010. The screenshot tells the story: Notice that anonymous methods now have a suffix? This tells you immediately that the 2 threads are not at the same method.

• Tasks documentation

  Posted: 19 May 2009 at 22:11 by The Moth

  Interested in the System.Threading.Tasks namespace? Read here the official MSDN documentation. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

• Parallel Tasks – new Visual Studio 2010 debugger window

  Posted: 15 May 2009 at 16:55 by The Moth

  Assumed knowledge aka Background Reading .NET 4 introduces a new class that lives in mscorlib that I have blogged about before: System.Threading.Tasks.Task, which as you'll recall is also what Parallel.For depends on. Collectively, all those new classes is what we refer to as Task Parallel Library and the team that owns it has blogged what is new for TPL in Beta1. Another .NET 4 feature I blogged about before also depends on Tasks for its implementation: Parallel LINQ.

• PDB Files

  Posted: 14 May 2009 at 05:39 by The Moth

  I want to share this comprehensive blog article by John Robbins. No need to paraphrase the title, it perfectly describes the content already: PDB Files: What Every Developer Must Know. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

• Axum

  Posted: 10 May 2009 at 04:01 by The Moth

  My colleagues have released to DevLabs an incubation project: Axum (fka "Maestro"). "Axum aims to validate a safe and productive parallel programming model for .NET" " Axum is a language that builds upon the architecture of the Web and principles of isolation, actors, and message-passing to increase application safety, responsiveness, scalability, and developer productivity.

• Windows 7 Task Manager screenshot

  Posted: 28 Apr 2009 at 12:59 by The Moth

  Previously I linked to a screenshot of 96 virtual processors and now I have access to a machine that tops that!Count them:Nothing else to share here, just a geek showing off ;-) Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

• Nice collection of .NET 4 links

  Posted: 25 Apr 2009 at 07:46 by The Moth

  Just came across (and thought I'd share) these resources for .NET 4 and C# 4 features on Bogdan's blog post. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

• CLR 4 ThreadPool Enhancements

  Posted: 24 Apr 2009 at 07:22 by The Moth

  Eric Eilebrecht (dev on CLR) is kicking off a blog post series on improvements to the CLR 4 ThreadPool. If you've used the .NET ThreadPool, you must read his first installment. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

• Best source code comments

  Posted: 23 Apr 2009 at 07:18 by The Moth

  Literally laughed out loud when this was forwarded to me and they are way too funny not to share – from stackoverflow:What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered? Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

• Measuring performance under Visual Studio

  Posted: 07 Apr 2009 at 09:58 by The Moth

  When I created my Visual Studio C# demos for showing off Tasks versus Threads, I of course created the project in Release mode, but there were 2 additional things that I had to do.One had little impact, but is important to remember: set the power plan on Windows to "High Performance". Otherwise CPU usage can be throttled by the OS, which is not what you want when you are demonstrating parallelism and 100% CPU usage ;-)The other had a profound impact and had me puzzled for a bit: use Ctrl+F5 inst

• Internet Explorer 8 using Restart APIs to full potential

  Posted: 20 Mar 2009 at 02:49 by The Moth

  I have been playing with internal bits of Internet Explorer 8 for a while and it is pretty cool. Today the final version has shipped and you can download IE8 from the Microsoft site. To see the many cool enhancements I'd encourage you to watch the short videos (or at least just the Overview) on the dedicated IE8 videos page.One of the things I like doing to new apps is crashing them. When a windows app crashes, I fully expect it to restart and restore the state it had before it died. I ranted in

• Internet Explorer 8 using Restart APIs to full potential

  Posted: 19 Mar 2009 at 12:49 by The Moth

  I have been playing with internal bits of Internet Explorer 8 for a while and it is pretty cool. Today the final version has shipped and you can download IE8 from the Microsoft site. To see the many cool enhancements I'd encourage you to watch the short videos (or at least just the Overview) on the dedicated IE8 videos page.One of the things I like doing to new apps is crashing them. When a windows app crashes, I fully expect it to restart and restore the state it had before it died. I ranted in