Curing the asynchronous blues with the Reactive Extensions for .NET
By: Matt Podwysocki

In today's world, we want to create applications both rich in data and in behavior. The problem has been in the past that asynchronous and event based programming has been difficult, especially in the coordination between events and error handling. Come learn how the Reactive Extensions ("Rx") framework takes care of the difficult parts of asynchronous programming by viewing asynchronous computations as push-based collections. Instead of focusing on the hard parts, developers now can start dreaming about the endless possibilities of orchestrating and synchronizing computations at a high-level of abstraction. In this session we cover the design philosophy of the Reactive Extensions for .NET, rooted on the deep duality between the well-known iterator and the observer design patterns. From this core understanding, we start looking at various combinators and operators defined over observable collections, as provided by Rx, driving concepts home by a few samples showing rich applications that coordinate both external data and events in new and interesting ways. Democratizing asynchronous programming starts today.

About Matt Podwysocki - Matt Podwysocki has been a professional developer for 11 years and writing software since he was 7 years old with his trusty Commodore 64. Matt is currently a Senior Consultant at Microsoft in Washington, DC. In addition to his day job, he is also actively engaged with the product groups such as F#, the Reactive Extensions and more.

As a programming language enthusiast, he has a deep interest learning a new language every year with a lot of recent time spent in Haskell, Erlang, Clojure, JavaScript, Python, Ruby and F#.

He has spoken at conferences both internal and external to Microsoft and acted as an co-organizer for such events as ALT.NET Seattle and no:sql(east).

In addition to founding DC ALT.NET, he is active in the Washington, DC developer community with co-organizing NoVALang, a polyglot user group and speaks at other local user groups. You can find him on his blog at http://codebetter.com/blogs/matthew.podwysocki/