VS2010 Beta 2 Download

VS2010 Beta 2 is now available for download for MSN subscribers.

Geometric Decomposition Screencast

I’ve posted a new screen cast on the Rock Solid Knowledge screen casts side that provides an example of how to partition a set of data for parallel processing.

The screen cast covers a simple way using Parallel.ForEach, and a more efficient version combining the use of Barrier.

You can checkout the screen cast and others here

Parallel utilities

Whilst working with .NET 4 parallel extensions I often find the need to extend the framework to assist me in various day to day tasks.  I’ve finally got around to compiling a library of such extensions.

The extensions include the following

• Set Process Affinity, so I can see how my algorithm scales on a different number of cores.  Will select non hyperthreaded cores first.
• Determine the number of Real cores, not including hyperthreading ones.
• A Range type that supports the partitioning of a range so that I can farm sub ranges out to different tasks
• A Sequence class for building non integer parallel loops or loops with steps other than 1
• Finally a simplified way to handle aggregated exceptions.

You can download the library from here

Its a Visual Studio 2010 project, containing the library and a unit test project which should provide enough insight to how the library works.

Im very keen to know what people think of the aggregate exception handling.

Are Singletons Evil ?

Finally got around to delivering a conference talk on this subject this week at Software Architecture Week, its a topic myself and Kevin Jones are constantly being asked.  Of course a quick google reveals the answer there are numerous rants about this evil pattern.  But like most things in life its not as simple as yes or no. 

Our goal for this talk was to expose the areas were this pattern causes a developer a whole load of pain.  In fact one member of the audience was experiencing such pain in his attempt to take legacy code base heavily utilising singletons and start to write unit tests. 

So whilst the majority of the time was spent examining the consequences of using the singleton pattern we also took time to  highlight that one or two singletons correctly positioned in your application could in fact enable unit testing, and coding to interface without having to refactor large areas of a legacy code base.

This talk took the format of a short geeky play, featuring two developers trying to wrestle with getting the job done and unit testing.  You can download the script and accompanying code

So like all good consultants our answer to this question is “It Depends”