Talks in 2006

Delegates may be the least-understood part of the CLR. Delegates look a bit like method pointers, but the differences go well beyond delegates' multi-cast abilities. I will start with a quick survey of delegate basics, including invocation list editing and event syntax (which few people seem to really understand). I will then explore 2.0's anonymous methods before concluding with a lengthy discussion of asynchronous delegate execution and the system ThreadPool. Along the way, I'll touch on minor topics like covariance and contravariance as well as creating a delegate instead of repeatedly invoking a dynamically loaded method. (PowerPoint slides)

Now that .NET 2.0 is out of beta, we can use the new features in production code. I surveyed 2.0 features and talked about how they can be used in real programs. Open types can make code both smaller and faster. Anonymous methods make your code smaller and clearer. Iterators make it much easier to enumerate nested data structures. I also talkeded a bit about the existing .NET asynch features - particularly the system thread pool, and asynch invocation of delegates. (PowerPoint slides)