Community developer blogs

Daniel Moth

Recent Posts

• TIP: VS keyboard shortcut for editor tooltip

  Posted: yesterday by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  It is Ctrl+K, Ctrl+I (just place your keyboard cursor on a variable and try it). You could have found this out on your own via the Tools->Options menu: Unfortunately there isn't one for the datatip when debugging. Instead you can show the equivalent (and older) "Quick Watch" via Ctrl+Alt+Q or even b

• New and Improved CLR 4 Thread Pool Engine

  Posted: 24 Nov 2008 at 02:26 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  A way to think of the CLR thread pool and how it gets used, e.g. when you call ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem, is to picture a global queue where work items (essentially delegates) get queued on a global queue and multiple threads pick them out in a First In First Out order. The FIFO order is not some

• Debugging Parallel Applications with VS2010

  Posted: 19 Nov 2008 at 17:48 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  I have mentioned previously on this blog the two new debugger toolwindows our team is adding to Visual Studio 2010: Parallel Tasks and Parallel Stacks. I will be blogging a lot more about these, so for now I encourage you to get a high level understanding by watching my 10-minute screencast. All fee

• Taking Parallelism Mainstream

  Posted: 18 Nov 2008 at 14:58 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  At the PDC2008 attendees received USB hard disks with tons of software and information. One of the items was a technical whitepaper that my org published and you can open that XPS document directly here. For more, I have a permalink to our Parallel Computing Dev Center on the left pane of my blog. C

• How Many Cores does Windows Support?

  Posted: 17 Nov 2008 at 14:38 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  At external and internal parallel programming sessions I have on one of my slides a screenshot of the Task Manager window showing 64 cores (!). There is always someone in the audience that didn’t know Windows can support that many. To see the screenshot for yourself, visit MarkRuss's blog post.Even

• TIP: Task Manager Shortcuts

  Posted: 16 Nov 2008 at 03:10 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  In my demos more often than not I bring up task manager (e.g. so I can show the CPU utilization). If you do the same, here are 4 tips.1. Ctrl+Shift+ESC brings it up (no need to right click on taskbar and select the Task Manager menuitem)2. On the Performance (or Networking) tab, double cli

• Parallel Programming Session from Tech Ed EMEA 2008

  Posted: 15 Nov 2008 at 18:02 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  Last week I repeated in Barcelona for Tech Ed EMEA 2008 the PDC08 session that I gave in LA. The European recording appears to be also available online on the home page for your viewing pleasure. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

• Fishbowl Video Interview on Parallelism at Tech Ed Online

  Posted: 15 Nov 2008 at 09:00 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  Mark Dunn asked me some questions on parallel computing during a 15 minute interview at the fishbowl in Barcelona. Find it on this web page (or watch it directly in your media player). Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

• Podcast with NxtGenUG folks from PDC08

  Posted: 15 Nov 2008 at 07:37 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  You may (or may not) wish to listen in on a 5 minute random chat (after a few beers at the Ask The Experts) I had with Chris Hay and John McLoughlin (NxtGenUG boys) on their PDC podcast (38:45 – 43:25). Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

• Do NOT Explicitly Use Threads for Parallel Programming

  Posted: 11 Nov 2008 at 01:20 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  I presume you are sold on the goal of achieving fine grained parallelism – if not please read that post.In that post I talked quite a bit about the need to partition our work into many small chunks. So how could we partition a long running work item that looks like this: static void Main() { Tr

• Parallel Programming and the Virtual PC limitation

  Posted: 08 Nov 2008 at 01:24 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  The question of "How do I try/show the parallel bits in VS2010 outside of the VPC?" or variants of that keeps appearing in my inbox. That is because of Virtual PC's limitation to only run one core, which kind of sucks for parallel programming.Here is the story:1. The VS2010/.NET 4.0 CTP is only

• Fine Grained Parallelism

  Posted: 07 Nov 2008 at 00:32 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  When trying to take advantage of multi-core machines, the first step is to identify the areas in your code that can literally run at the same time. Unless you are really lucky, what this step really means is you will have to partition your compute bound work into smaller chunks that can run in paral

• Threading/Concurrency vs Parallelism

  Posted: 03 Nov 2008 at 04:24 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  To take advantage of multiple cores from our software, ultimately threads have to be used. Because of this fact, some developers fall in the trap of equating multithreading to parallelism. That is not accurate.You can have multithreading on a single core machine, but you can only have parallelism on

• Catch the "Parallel Programming in .NET 4.0" session online

  Posted: 30 Oct 2008 at 17:15 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  Things have been crazy busy leading up to PDC and now it is finally drawing to a close and I look forward to my flight back to Seattle from LA.Those of you that did not have a chance to attend my TL26 session can watch it online (or download it from) here.If you did attend my session, please make su

• Video on Parallel Developer Tools

  Posted: 18 Oct 2008 at 02:24 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  Last week SeanNo, SteveTei and I spent 40 minutes with Charles from channel9 discussing and showing what we are working on in PDT for Visual Studio 2010 for enhancing the debugging and profiling experience for parallel programming.Watch the ch9 video here.Comments about this post welcome at the orig

• Add "Parallel Programming in .NET 4.0" to your PDC schedule

  Posted: 18 Oct 2008 at 01:59 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  The (really cool) schedule builder on the PDC site now includes timeslots for all sessions. Come to mine on Wednesday 29 October at 10:30 AM (straight after the keynote) in Petree Hall CD.Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

• Video on Parallel Developer Tools

  Posted: 17 Oct 2008 at 20:24 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  Last week SeanNo, SteveTei and I spent 40 minutes with Charles from channel9 discussing and showing what we are working on in PDT for Visual Studio 2010 for enhancing the debugging and profiling experience for parallel programming.Watch the ch9 video here. Comments about this post welcome at the ori

• Email Rules

  Posted: 13 Oct 2008 at 03:20 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  Back in my MVP days before joining Microsoft I used to help out a lot on newsgroups and forums so I wrote a piece about Newsgroup Rules. The time has come to do the same for Professional Email.Many of us work in organizations where email is the primary mode of communication dominating every other me

• Email Rules

  Posted: 13 Oct 2008 at 03:20 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  Back in my MVP days before joining Microsoft I used to help out a lot on newsgroups and forums so I wrote a piece about Newsgroup Rules. The time has come to do the same for Professional Email.Many of us work in organizations where email is the primary mode of communication dominating every other me

• Parallel Extensions are part of the .NET Framework 4.0

  Posted: 11 Oct 2008 at 21:59 by noreply@blogger.com (The Moth)

  There have been two CTPs for the "Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework 3.5" (readers of this blog will remember November and June).Aligned with the recent announcement about .NET 4.0 coming, the pfxteam announced yesterday that Parallel Extensions gets rolled into .NET Framework 4.0.This is gre