Archive for octobre 2008

22
oct

Quick'n dirty : make Wordpress post entirely available on planets

Here is a tip if you use WordPress and your blog post aren’t appearing on Planets.

When your post is finished, click on the ‘Preview’ button. Highlight your article’s content, right-click on it and select ‘View selection source’ (probably different if you use something else than Firefox). Then simply copy and paste the HTML code in the ‘Summary’ text box which is under ‘Advanced options’, almost at the bottom of the page where you write/edit your article.

That way, you will force the summary tag in the RSS file to contain your article. Indeed, some Planet aggregator extracts the text from this tag rather than from content:encoded which WordPress uses for storing post.


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11
oct

C#4, .NET 4 and concurrency

ParallelFx has been around for quite a long time now (first CTP was released on December, 2007). Up until now it was a separate library, labeled as an extension and thus bundled in its own assembly. However, today, ParallelFx developers announced on their blog that the final ParallelFx version should be available as an official part of the upcoming .NET 4 framework.

In addition, with the PDC near the corner, informations are beginning to filtrate about C#4. As can be seen on several videos on Channel 9 (this one particularly), the C#4 design team is seriously planning to add language features that will help programmers do multi-threaded and concurrent programs.

Most noticeably, Anders speaks, around 5:30, about compiler-enforced purity (which can be already found in other imperative language like D) and automatic isolation of objects (I suspect it’s a sort of STM where object manipulations are bundled in separate transaction).

Both of them also make very good points about the difficulty for compilers to assert that a piece of code is parallelizable. Since even experienced programmers can make mistakes about the thread-safety of their code, it appears hard for compiler to automagically assure that a piece of code is indeed side effect free in a imperative world like C# (a problem that language like Haskell don’t know, being pure by default). I also like the position of Anders about C# as an hybrid imperative/functional language.

/me is looking forward to PDC for more parallel goodness and to start implementing these features in Mono ;-) .


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