KludgeHack

Mole, the new WPF visualization tool
12 December 2007 in Programming | Comments (3)

Remember Snoop? Well, there a new tool in town, and promises to do even more. The name of this new Visual Studio Visualizer is Mole II, and was created by Josh Smith, Andrew Smith and Karl Shifflett.

From the blog:

Mole is a high performance, full featured, multifunction visualizer that allows in-depth inspection of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) visual and logical trees. For each element in the visual or logical tree the developer can view all properties, visual image, run-time XAML or IEnumerable collection data.

Mole allows developers to drill back into the managed heap and view properties and data structures of the above objects and all their child sub-objects. 

You can download the binaries for VS2005 or VS2008, or even the complete sources at their Blog or at the CodeProject Article.

From my short tests, I was happy to see the lightning fast performance they so humbly promised.

Parallel Computing with .NET
8 December 2007 in Microsoft & Programming | Comments (0)

I’ve now spoke several times about Microsoft parallel computing approach (programming model for data and task parallelism), and if didn’t notice yet, you can now download the December 2007 CTP (first make sure you have the RTM version of the .NET 3.5 runtime).

You also can check out a few videos about this.

By the way, if you’re interested in this subject, check the ‘Manycore Shift‘ paper from Microsoft.

Programming in the Age of Concurrency
22 October 2007 in Microsoft & Programming | Comments (1)

I spoke recently about the Parallel FX (PFX) extension for .NET, and not much happen in this subject until now. Channel9 has an interview with Anders Hejlsberg and Joe Duffy about this.

The interview displays some details on this new technology, from the basics to a more detailed information about the current architecture and implementation.

Although I think a lot of work still needs to be made, I’m sure this will be an awesome start point for concurrent programming in the .NET framework.

Parallel Processing
16 September 2007 in Microsoft & Programming | Comments (2)

The October 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine was recently released and can be downloaded at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/10/default.aspx.

This edition seems to be focused on Parallel processing, a subject well spread around the web this days. Pooled Threads, WPF Threads, Parallel LINQ, Parallel Performance, etc.

The one article I find special interesting is the Parallel Processing: Optimize Managed Code For Multi-Core Machines. Introduces the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and shows some simple ways to real improve .NET code for multi-core systems, without to much change in the code.

There’s also another article focused on WPF, explaining how to easily use the UI thread and the Dispatcher to build a more responsive application.

Its a good read, if you’re interested.

Free controls for Windows.Forms
6 September 2007 in Programming | Comments (0)

The Krypton Toolkit is a free package from the Component Factory that offers several improvements to the Windows Forms providing the Office 2007 palette to all the components you use. You can easily customize so it uses your own color palette.

As any professional tool, this comes with full documentation and some samples.

You can download the latest version here. Also, keep checking their blog for news.

If you want to customize further you can have a look at their paid professional package: Krypton Ribbon. Although its not free (99$), its definitely worth the money.