Channel 9

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The folks over at Channel9 have posted my first video over here. If you don't know what the site is, the quick explanation is that it's a repository of video conversations with people at Microsoft. In this case, Charles Torre sat down with me to talk about random tricks for Visual C++ developers, some history about the IDE and even some discussions about mixing native and managed code with C++. I will not say that the video is great as I'm not sure anyone really feels that way about seeing themselves on a screen. However, many of the tips I discuss are the ones I've shown at conferences with a lot of success. On the other hand, given an unfortunate camera placement, it looks as though I'm either depressed or praying, so you can have a laugh about that. I encourage you to provide feedback in the comments, which I am monitoring.

I thought I'd plug other videos on the site that I find cool, which aren't necessarily related to C++.

  • CCR: Concurrency and Coordination Runtime. George Chrysanthakopoulos talks uber-passionately about this technology and that alone makes it worth the watch. CCR is essentially a (.NET) library, which provides a neat way to perform "join" operations to coordinate concurrent tasks. There's the OOPSLA paper linked from the page if you'd rather read about it. Look out for the funky way they use the C# "yield" keyword J
  • Phoenix Framework. Jim Hogg was the first person on my interview loop with the C++ team and I remember him describing the Phoenix project in about 10 minutes to someone without the most extensive compiler experience. Nonetheless, I was immediately interested, a testament to Jim's engrossing style (or maybe it's just that Scottish accent!).
  • Brandon Bray on VC++ 2005. The talk is particularly interesting if you're working with C++ and managed code since he designed much of the language we dubbed C++/CLI. I'm not even sure I need to explain why this video is worth watching, since Brandon's name echoes for eternity in the blogosphere. I use this Gladiator-esque description because he introduced me to Bjarne and, well, his mastery of C++ (and C++/CLI) is just damn impressive. Maybe it's because he sits next to Herb Sutter
    J
  • Anders on LINQ. The inevitable Anders. He comes off great on camera so it's easy to recommend this and LINQ is pretty interesting stuff as well. I'm not a big fan of the database access side of it, however the functional programming aspects are cool (lambda expressions, extension methods, etc…)
  • Plenty more, which I'll leave to another time…