I’ve been watching more FOSDEM videos. They are very cool. Watching in 720p is awesome.
Alan McGovern on The Evolution of MonoTorrent – By far the best bittorrent library for .net. Alan talks about the challenges of writing a library that will handle things like hundreds (if not thousands) of simultaneous socket connections, why using threads to do so is wrong, and how good design and the async pattern made it easy and fast.
Stephane Delcroix on Image Processing – I was really looking forward to this one – Mono.SIMD is awesome – but the whole thing is code and the non-bold small font on a white background did not get picked up by the projector. Needless to say that Mono.SIMD is still awesome, but the talk isn’t really worth watching. I’ll be it was cool live though. If you don’t know Mono.SIMD is yet another Mono innovation that is Mono-only. It provides an object oriented api for the underlying SIMD instructions in modern cpus. These are the SSE instructions that you see listed in the spec about your Core2 CPU.
Jeremie Laval on Parallel Fx – This is NOT just another talk on Parallel Fx aka Task Parallel Library+PLINQ. Jeremie actually wrote Mono’s implementation of TPL. While its great to see Stephen Toub show use cases of TPL, the geek in me wants to see what is under the hood. Jeremie gets into some of the challenges in implementing the scheduler and library. He also mentioned that .NET4’s thread pool actually uses the TPL scheduler underneath. I didn’t know that. He also shows a demo of Future<> which I had never considered. Chaining Future<>’s in a tree like manner in order to create parallel delayed evaluation.
Andreia Gaita on Moonlight and You – Why moonlight is important to mono? WOW! They are working on XAML designers for MonoDevelop. I can’t imagine how awesome moonlight development will be on Linux in the future. Moonlight is super close to working in Chrome on Linux. mxap –desktop lets you create moonlight desktop apps launchable with the mopen command. Very cool. Desktop apps in moonlight. Very cool pixel shaders on video in moonlight 3.
Jim Purbrick on Building The Virtual Babel – Mono in Second Life – The virtual worlds in Second Life and how it has progressed for 7 years. Very cool to hear how an existing language LSL and existing virtual machine was moved to a new virtual machine, Mono. I’ve never heard of JavaGoX or Brakes so listening to the description of script migration was rather mind blowing.(very cool)
Joe Shields on OSCTool – learning C# and Mono by Doing – While probably not of interest to a lot of developers, this one hit close to home for me because I was in a position pretty close to Joe’s about 8 years ago. Of course I didn’t know .NET at the time and Mono was still very young, but I do recall playing with some ASMX web services to do things similar to what he was doing. Joe makes a point that python, perl, C and even Java have cross platform difficulties (think HPUX, Itanium, Tru64 etc) of which Mono seems to mitigate much. The audio goes out for a few minutes in the middle, just skip to about 17:00 and watch the demo.
Mirco Bauer on Smuxi – IRC in a modern environment – Just an irc client with some special features. I’ll definitely be looking into this because I’m an IRC junkie, and it also has the exact twitter client that I’ve been looking for since I started using twitter.