Mike Weinhardt adds a 4th installment to my series on threading in Windows Forms by illustrating the BackgroundWorker component from Windows Forms 2.0. I have to admit that after I saw this component, I felt very silly for not wrapping my own code up in this form. Thank goodness for .the Windows Forms 2.0 team. : )

I first heard about Marc Clifton on his work with MyXaml, a declarative UI language that shares a name and some principles with the XAML declarative language in Longhorn, but that works on .NET now. Until today, I had missed his earlier work on this subject: The Application Automation Layer: Introduction And Design, along with the rest of his 51 articles on CodeProject.com (wow).

I’ve never met Marc, but I’d sure like to. He seems like an interesting guy, both because of his work and because of this statement in his CodeProject bio: “Having no formal education in software development, he feels exceptionally qualified to inflict his opinions on the community at large regarding how programming should be done.” Now that’s the kind of attitude I like!

Marc, if you’re going to be in the Pacific Northwest anytime soon, look me up!

Mike and I write our first cut and what’s new and cool in Windows Forms 2.0 in this month's MSDN Magazine.

Here.

The one where I learn a bunch of interesting stuff reading all of the annotations from The .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference in one sitting.

Here.

I find it unbelievable that after umpteen books, I finally seem to have blended quality with quantity as the C# version of my WinForms book enters it’s 3rd printing after only 8 months in publication. Wahoo!

Here.

My co-author for the 2nd edition of Windows Forms Programming, Michael Weinhardt, doesn’t have enough to do to with the new features in Whidbey or all of the stuff that I wished that I added to the 1st edition but didn’t. No, he wants more, so he asked me to ask you nice folks what you’d like to see.

The goal of the 2/e edition of the book is to cover the features of WinForms Whidbey as well as related .NET features that are important to WinForms programmers. Also, we’d like to continue to encapsulate WinForms community best practices. What did I miss in either of these categories that you’d like to see in the 2/e?

Here.

Well, I can’t put it off any longer. I wanted to wait ’til Chris Tavares and I were able to figure out what the problem was, but after months of help from the Compuware guys using a complementary hunk of their latest and greatest profiling software, we’re no closer to finding out what causes the massive slow-down in compiling Rotor when we add our ref-counting implementation to it. The problem, of course, is that if we can’t figure out what the problem is, we can’t optimize our implementation to fix it.

The good news is that once we wait for the compilation to complete, the hybrid ref-counting (for deterministic resource management) + ref-tracking (for memory management) programming model is a thing of beauty. No longer do you have to write Dispose methods or even call Dispose methods, because our updated JITter takes care of it for you.

However, because compilation of Rotor makes such nice use as a managed test of our implementation and because it currently sucks butt perf-wise, we’re stuck. If you’re into the low-level guts and you’ve got the time (that’s what Chris and I ran out of), we’d love your feedback on our perf problems. Who knows, if we can make it efficient, MS might stick it into the next version of the CLR… (but I don’t work for that team, so don’t hold me to that : ).

BTW, I’d like to really thank Chris Tavares for his implementation work. It was my idea and my funding, but he did all the work up to and including several drafts of the paper. All I did was complain. Thanks, Chris, and I hope you’re enjoying your child, which is a far better way to spend your free time than implementing my cockamamie ideas in Rotor.

BTW2, I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly apologize to Brian Harry. It is definitely the case that ref-counting *can* be added to .NET but I have in no way shown that it *should* be done. Thanks for letting me try, though. : )

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