The MVP Global Summit 2011 took place in Redmond and Bellevue at the beginning of March. This year I attended for the fifth time, and as usual it was a great time. Fellow MVPs, discussions with the Microsoft product groups, parties, everything made it worth it. And this year it was also a little bit special because I was named C++ MVP of the Year, a distinction shared with Kate Gregory. A 3rd C++ MVP, Sheng Jiang, was also named MVP of the Year as top answerer in the MSDN forums. As an MVP of the Year I was invited to attend a dinner held by S. Somasegar, senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, where I joined the other MVPs of the year in the awarded categories (such as C#, VB, ASP.NET, etc.), but also top figures from Microsoft, such as Scott Guthrie, Jason Zander, Anders Hejlsberg or Scott Hanselman and the Microsoft community leads. This is a picture from the event, showing, from left to right, Sheng Jiang, myself, Diego Dagum – Windows C++ community PM, and Kate Gregory.
Another special moment at this summit was being interviewed by Charles Torre for channel9. He did several interviews with C++ MVPs and these interviews were posted on channel9 recently. Here you can find the original post for the interview with Alon Fliess, Bruno Boucard, Jim Berveridge and myself. We talked mostly about C++, but also the MVP program.
The other interviews that I mentioned can be found here:
Channel9 recently posted a video with the Parallel Computing Concurrency Runtime team talking, mainly, about tasks and continuations, new features to the Parallel Patterns Library. These are already available through the ConcRT Extra’s Sample Pack. You can watch the half hour interview with the team here.
Besides the new stuff they shown, I particularly liked two things that Artur Laksberg said. The first was about the difference between parallelism and concurrency:
Parallelism is doing the same amount of work faster by utilizing multiple cores, multiple processors. Concurrency is understood as doing more work in the same amount of time.
The other one was about threads and tasks:
We want people to stop thinking about threads and start thinking in terms of independent, or not independent, units of work. You have one piece of work, you compose it with another piece of work and you have two tasks, you join together and what you get as a result is another task. And then, concurrency, as somebody said, just happens. It just happens if the runtime decides it’s beneficial for you, that it is safe to execute those two chunks, tasks, in parallel.
Hopefully people will start understanding that threads are obsolete and they should be thinking in tasks.
Visual Studio 2010, currently in beta 1, replaces VCBuild with MSBuild as the build system, aligning C++ with the other languages that already used MSBuild. The VC++ team has already posted several articles on it’s blog about the new build system. Channel 9 has published recently a video with Bogdan Mihalcea, a developer in the VC++ build and system project team, talking about MSBuild. You can watch the video here.
