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The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson

CCR SDK and more benefits to .NET

There is a new video on the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime on Channel9. The CCR was developed by the Bigtop group and led by George Chrysanthakopoulos and Satnam Singh. In the video, these two describe the problem they were trying to solve, their approach, and some of its features.

CCR is billed as an Asynchronous Messaging Library for C# 2.0. This is a modest tagline considering it appears to greatly ease the coordination of large numbers of concurrent tasks that one would typically implement using threads and locking mechanisms. Anyone who has tried to do this manually knows that this can be quite a chore to write not to mention to write properly. Mr. Singh correctly points out that one of the problems with typical development of multi-threaded code is to analyze every possible interleaving of code paths. It appears that using this library one can greatly simplify the coordination necessary between these different concurrent tasks.

One of the most compelling facets of this work is that it is a library not a language nor set of language extensions. This means that all of the .NET languages can benefit from this SDK. The library may be billed as being for C#, but from the discussion in the video, it is clear that it can be used from myriad languages. I think this is important. In one of my recent posts, I made a point that VB6 was always a second-class language for Microsoft, but that VB.NET is not. The CCR being developed in and for .NET 2.0 underscores this point: it provides benefits to developers regardless of which language they choose.

The advantages that Microsoft is handing to the ISVs developing with managed code are impressive. At first, managed code meant “just” the .NET Framework. Now it is becoming to mean so much more: Microsoft is pushing managed code into the OS (i.e., WinFx) and into its products (e.g., SQL Server 2005 and Office); SDKs like the CCR and Windows Workflow Foundation provide much more than you would expect out of a Framework. Is it any wonder that I push .NET development?

Anyway, the release of the CCR is “imminent” or “in the first half of 2006 or earlier”. You can find more information on the CCR wiki. There is a link there to a paper which appears to be a superset of the wiki content.

I look forward to evaluating it in more detail. I’m excited by the leverage that this SDK will bring to the Digipede Network.

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