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I love it when I discover a new blog with great content. I came across Alik Levin’s quite by accident after he left a comment on my blog. As far as I can tell, he has not been blogging long, but he is really pumping out some excellent articles. Several of his recent posts stand out for me: How to Use Outlook 2007 RSS To Effectively Aggregate And Distill Information, ARCast With Ron Jacobs – Defending the Application (kudos!), and Why I Blog. It seems we both practice My Pipeline Is My Inbox! I definitely recommended checking out his blog.

In February, I posted a short regular expression tool roundup and I have just updated the list of resources with a link to this site, Regular-Expressions.info which has great explanations of the various regular expression constructs. The examples and tutorials pages are also worth checking out.

If you have any links to good regular expression examples, please feel free to share them.

Nick has mentioned that the Perth .NET user group has a soon to be revealed, mystery presenter coming in June (Thursday, 7th June). I can reveal a few more clues. Any poor puns are entirely my fault!:

• He’s a dynamic kind of guy
• He’s been a program manager and developer
• He’s been known to get excited by G flat!
• If he’s late, he’s usually bound!

On reflection, you’ll definitely enjoy his talk. This is an exciting event, and one I urge you not to miss if you’re in Perth on the 7th June.

The venue and more details will be announced via the UG feed, so to make sure you don’t miss it, add it to your RSS reader…

Since the introduction of .NET, I’ve thought there was an empty niche just waiting for another VB. With Microsoft’s recent resurgence of interest in dynamic languages and notable hirings in this area (John Lam for instance), it was not really a surprise to see this post “Visual Basic 10 is in the works”.

The working name is VBx. Personally I think they should call it “VB on Rails”! Joking aside, I think this could be the next big thing for Microsoft. Who knows, maybe the .NET Framework will go the way of MFC… I do hope they pick up the Ruby on Rails mantra of “Convention over Configuration”

Steve McConnell starting blogging must have slipped quietly under the radar back in March. The software industry would be less without Steve’s many contributions. I hope he finds time to keep it up.

Nothing new in this article, but it’s explained very clearly and I need a quick reference for the next time someone asks me about this topic and I’ve forgotten it!

My first job after university involved designing and writing parallel algorithms, and over the intervening 20 years I’ve always taken a keen interest in the subject. I’d always thought that by now, desktop PCs would contain upwards of 32 processors, whereas 2 processors are only just becoming commonplace. At the March 2007 MVP summit, Bill Gates said that parallel programming will be one of the big new challenges facing the .NET development programming community:

“…the ability to take multiple processors and use them in parallel has been a
programming challenge going back many, many decades, so now it’s important
that we actually solve that problem, and make it possible for developers of all
types to take advantage of these multi-core devices.”

May’s 2007 issue of MSDN magazine has an excellent article on Reusable Parallel Data Structures and Algorithms by Joe Duffy, a renowned developer in the .NET threading arena. He has an upcoming book “Concurrent Programming on Windows”, due to be released by Addison Wesley sometime in 2007. One to watch out for…

Over at Michael Suess’s ThinkingParallel blog, he’s been running a series of interviews with parallelism industry leaders in different environments, including Ten Questions with Joe Duffy about Parallel Programming and .NET Threads.

The following are all good resources on how to get started for developers new to .NET threading:

• Joe Duffy’s blog
• Chris Brumme’s blog
• Vance Morrison’s blog

There is also an index of past MSDN Magazine articles on .NET concurrency.

In the comments to my post of a few days ago on logging with log4net, Alik Levin raised a good question:

“Why would I actually use log4net for ASP.NET 2 (VS2005) instead of the built in
health monitoring?”

I’m sure I must have seen ASP.NET 2.0 Health Monitoring before but it had completely slipped my mind! I followed the link Alik supplied and it does look interesting. Now, I obviously have not used it in a live application, so I’m shooting from the hip, but to answer Alik’s question, the only reasons that spring to mind are to have a coherent logging stragey in place across all application types, and perhaps the number of different ‘appenders’ that are available. Also, the API seems a bit heavy if I have to instantiate a class for every event that is raised. That said, if you are starting out on a new project it’s definitely worth evaluating.

An update of the Windows debugger, WinDBG, has been released (6.7.5.0). You can download here.