TechEd is half over and I’ve only been able to attend a few sessions. Nevertheless there’s lots of new stuff coming down the pike. Here’s my favorite things thus far. Note that no release dates (or even guarantees) are available yet.
Juneau (aka SQL Server Data Tools)
Remember when VS2010 came out and suddenly none of your SQL projects could be loaded? Remember running the SQL Server 2008 R2 installer to get back your SQL projects? Remember having to keep VS2008 around until the tools were finally released? Oh wait – you still have to keep VS2008 around for some SQL projects. Oh well. MS has sworn that they don’t intent to make that mistake again and Juneau is the answer. Juneau is a set of tools for developing databases just like you do source code including the editor, solution explorer support, source control, etc – only much, much better. Rather than working directly with the database Juneau works with a model of the database (sound familiar?) Juneau can track changes that are made to the model and generate scripts to apply those changes back to the real database (either during development or later) without having to write any SQL scripts or wipe existing data. And that’s only the beginning. Juneau is taking advantage of VS’s excellent editor to allow you to work with the database model just like you would source code.
You can learn more about Juneau and why it is going to be so important for database development here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg427686.
Task-Based Asynchronous Programming
The Task Parallel Library (TPL) is becoming the preferred way to do asynchronous development since it removes the need to worry about the existing asynchronous patterns (begin/end, event based) and the thread pool. It is available as of .NET v4. You can read more about it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd460717.aspx. Honestly if you are doing .NET development then you’ll need to learn about TPL. It really is pretty straightforward to build even moderately complex pipelines of work.
Here’s an example. This is some sample code that starts a task that is similar to any code you might find that loads data from a database or WCF service. For demo purposes the code simply sleeps but imagine it was doing real work. Notice that calls to update the UI have to be marshalled to the UI thread. Also notice that once the task is complete we need to do some work.
{
CanRun = false;
var task = Task.Factory.StartNew(DoSomeWork, CancellationToken.None,
TaskCreationOptions.None, TaskScheduler.Default)
.ContinueWith(WorkCompleted);
}
private void DoSomeWork ()
{
Dispatcher.BeginInvoke((Action<string>)UpdateStatus, “Loading data…”);
LoadData();
Dispatcher.BeginInvoke((Action<string>)UpdateStatus, “Processing data…”);
ProcessData();
Dispatcher.BeginInvoke((Action<string>)UpdateStatus, “Finalizing data…”);
FinalizeData();
}
private void WorkCompleted ( Task t )
{
try
{
t.Wait();
Status = “Done”;
CanRun = true;
} catch (Exception e)
{
Status = e.Message;
};
}
private void LoadData ()
{
Thread.Sleep(5000);
}
private void ProcessData ( )
{
Thread.Sleep(5000);
}
private void FinalizeData ()
{
Thread.Sleep(300);
}
private void UpdateStatus ( string text )
{
Status = text;
}
The only real downside is that each task requires a method (or lambda) to run. This means you’ll end up having lots of little methods that run in some arbitrary thread and do one thing. This can make understanding the code far harder than it needs to be. Enter Task-based Asynchronous Programming (TAP). TAP is a couple of language extensions to C#/VB that makes the process of creating tasks simpler by allowing you to put all the task-related stuff into a single method. Any time asynchronous work needs to be done you use a keyword that tells the compiler that the work needs to be asynchronously. During compilation the compiler basically breaks up your code into tasks. You don’t have to any of the boilerplate work yourself. Here’s a sample of how it might look (keep in mind that it is a CTP and anything could change – and also I’m not currently running the CTP to verify the syntax).
{
CanRun = false;
var task = Task.Factory.StartNew(DoSomeWork, CancellationToken.None,
TaskCreationOptions.None, TaskScheduler.Default);
}
private async void DoSomeWork ()
{
try
{
Status = “Loading data…”;
await LoadData();
Status = “Processing data…”;
await ProcessData();
Status = “Finalizing data…”;
await FinalizeData();
Status = “Done”;
} catch (Exception e)
{
Status = e.Message;
};
CanRun = true;
}
private void LoadData ()
{
Thread.Sleep(5000);
}
private void ProcessData ( )
{
Thread.Sleep(5000);
}
private void FinalizeData ()
{
Thread.Sleep(300);
}
The CTP is available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/gg316360. Be careful about installing this on production machines as it does modify the compilers.
TPL Dataflow
As an extension to TAP, TPL Dataflow (still in development) uses blocks to represent parallel tasks of functionality. For example there is a block to join two collections into one, another block to transform one collection to another, etc. These blocks use tasks internally to manage the data sent to them. Basically each block can be thought of as a parallel algorithm and all that needs to be provided is the data. Dataflow is still too early in development to be useful but one can imagine an age where we have a workflow designer that allows us to drop blocks down to manage our data without regard for threading and the parallel algorithms needed. You can read more about TPL Dataflow here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/gg585582.
vNext
It is Microsoft after all. There are plenty of discussions about things coming in Visual Studio vNext (no release date yet though). Some are still in early phases of work while others are almost certainly already in. Still no demos of vNext so either the UI isn’t changing that much (yeah) or it is too early in the process to be showing it. Either way excitement for the new features is certainly obvious from the attendees I’ve talked to – especially parallel processing. If you haven’t been looking into parallel processing yet you might want to. It is an inevitable future for developers.
These are just the topics that I had a chance to sit in on at TechEd. Refer to the TechEd site (http://northamerica.msteched.com/default.aspx?fbid=yX5WuBwNOm8) for more information on what’s going on and all the cool things coming down the pike.