My Past and Present PCs

Before

I think it says a lot about the developer what sort of PC he/she has. Back when I was in my early 20 I had several:

• Linux (Fedora) Box – running exclusively traffic shaping (sometimes uptime of that box exceeded 1 year!). The actual script for traffic shaping took a lot of time and effort to write
• Windows Server – used as a DNS server and a POP3/SMTP server
• Windows Server with RAID5 – for storing all important data
• Windows Media Center – primarily for recording programs
• Main PC – Extreme CPU with water cooling, 4 GB Ram – back in those days it was a monster

These days I only have 2:

• Samsung Ativ Book 9 – 256 SSD, 8GB of RAM, have to say one of the best notebooks
• Main PC – Intel Extreme Edition CPU with 6 cores (2 logical for each core, so 12 in total), 64GB of RAM, OCZ SSD that goes directly into your motherboard, 2 Intel SSD, 1 x 2TB Hybrid HDD, 7 x 1 GB HDDs – that I need for running virtual machines.

So despite me getting older I am still a geek

TPL Dataflow

Overview

The Task Parallel Library (TPL) was introduced in the .NET Framework 4, providing core building blocks and algorithms for parallel computation and asynchrony.  This work was centered around the System.Threading.Tasks.Task type, as well as on a few higher-level constructs.  These higher-level constructs address a specific subset of common parallel patterns, e.g. Parallel.For/ForEach for delightfully parallel problems expressible as parallelized loops.

While a significant step forward in enabling developers to parallelize their applications, this work did not provide higher-level constructs necessary to tackle all parallel problems or to easily implement all parallel patterns.  In particular, it did not focus on problems best expressed with agent-based models or those based on message-passing paradigms.  These kinds of problems are quite prevalent in technical computing domains such as finance, biological sciences, oil & gas, and manufacturing.

For TPL Dataflow (TDF), we build upon the foundational layer provided in TPL in .NET 4. TDF is a complementary set of primitives to those primitives delivered in TPL in .NET 4, addressing additional scenarios beyond those directly and easily supported with the original APIs.  TPL Dataflow utilizes tasks, concurrent collections, tuples, and other features introduced in .NET 4 to bring support for parallel dataflow-based programming into the .NET Framework.  It also directly integrates with new language support for tasks and asynchrony provided by both C# and Visual Basic, and with existing language support in .NET 4 for tasks provided by F#.

Simple but awesome online utility!

The idea is very simple, you cherry-pick the applications, click on get installer and you get the installer with all the latest applications you selected as one file.

Next time you reinstalling Windows go to https://ninite.com/ and create yourself and installation package