Erik Meijer and team have created a profound and beautiful .NET library that will take managed event based programming to new levels. Of course, many of you wish that you could write LINQ expressions over events. Well, you can thanks to Erik's latest creation, Rx - .NET Reactive Framework. Erik, being a fundamentalist functional theoritician, can't create new programming abstractions without employing some form of monadic magic.
Enter astrophysicist and monadic composition wizard Brian Beckman. The last time Brian was on C9 he taught us about the State Monad. At the end of that discussion he mentioned he wanted to teach us about the Continuation Monad next. So, who better than to conduct this episode of Expert to Expert than Dr. Beckman? Yep. You guessed it! Rx employs the Continuation Monad in its composition. Erik is in the hot seat this time and it's always a real pleasure to converse with Erik and Brian in the same room at the same whiteboard.
Now, what is Rx?
The .NET Reactive Framework (Rx) is the mathematical dual of LINQ to Objects. It consists of a pair of interfaces IObserver/IObservable that represent push-based, or observable, collections, plus a library of extension methods that implement the LINQ Standard Query Operators and other useful stream transformation functions.
interface IObservable<out T>
{
IDisposable Subscribe(IObserver o);
}
interface IObserver<in T>
{
void OnDone();
void OnNext(T v);
void OnError(Exception e);
}
Observable collections capture the essence of the well-known subject/observer design pattern, and are tremendously useful for dealing with event-based and asynchronous programming, i.e. AJAX-style applications. For example, here is the prototypical Dictionary Suggest written using LINQ query comprehensions over observable collections:
IObservable<Html> q = from fragment in textBox
from definitions in Dictionary.Lookup(fragment, 10).Until(textBox)
select definitions.FormatAsHtml();
q.Subscribe(suggestions => { div.InnerHtml = suggestions; })
Please subscribe to this Channel 9 interview to be notified when we have clearance to distribute Rx over the counter (lame puns intended :-).
Tune in. This should prove to be an instant classic besides being a very important episode of E2E. Rx is deep, man. Deep.
Enjoy!
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