.net async model

[Rahul Revo]

Marshall,

First off thanks for your classes. They have really helped me in
understanding concurrency concepts better.

.net is introducing new language support for asynchronous programming.
Two videos on channel 9 that I saw are
http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Anders-Hejlsberg-Introducing-Async
and http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Mads-Torgersen-Inside-C-Async
. You had mentioned that you would talk about newer Java libraries
like the fork-join framework. It would be great if you could put some
async programming concepts in a Java context as well.

Thanks,
Rahul

[Marshall Pierce]

Those videos are Silverlight so I can't watch them, but I read a few
documents I found on C# (and VB.NET's) new Async stuff at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/async.aspx. (Also, Microsoft's
document downloads are in .docx format... how quaint.)

The continuation-based approach does have tidy syntax, but the sample
code in the whitepaper (downloading a bunch of URLs and calculating
the total size of all data downloaded) doesn't do any error handling
which is a somewhat unrealistic representation. The technique looks
like it would map best to UI-style programming where there is
necessarily one thread handling incoming events (and therefore a lot
of callback-based stuff). Server-side work tends to be more
parallelizable with less dependence on callbacks for working around
blocking or slow operations, so I would guess it has less
applicability there.

JSR 203 (NIO2) has some asynchronous IO support, but that's not easily
usable in its current form (you need to install a Java 7 build, not
just download a jar like you do for fork-join). I'll see if I can
gather some content to at least describe how the NIO2 async stuff
works.

On Nov 6, 4:32 pm, Rahul Revo <rahulr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Marshall,
>
> First off thanks for your classes. They have really helped me in
> understanding concurrency concepts better.
>
> .net is introducing new language support for asynchronous programming.

> Two videos on channel 9 that I saw arehttp://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Anders-Hejlsberg-Introducing-A...
> andhttp://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Mads-Torgersen-Inside-C-Async