Curing your event processing blues with Reactive Extensions (Rx)
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Abstract: Over the last years, we’ve seen a tremendous shift in the velocity of data. Ever increasing volumes of data are coming into our applications in an event-driven, asynchronous manner. Just imagine the bulk load of sensors in mobile devices, the social media fire hose, real-time trading and auction services, etc. This shift towards a push-based model for data acquisition prompts us to rethink the way we program our applications and services. No longer is the application in the driver seat of retrieving data. Instead, our code needs to react to a stream of incoming data. In this session, you’ll learn how Reactive Extensions (Rx) provides a nice programming abstraction for reactive event-driven programming, based on the notion of observable sequences and LINQ-style query support. Besides focusing on the essential abstractions, you’ll see a bunch of samples on how to use Rx to solve real-world problems, ranging from mobile application development on Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8, over sensor programming using state-of-the-art technologies such as Kinect, to large-scale cloud data processing and data center monitoring. We’ll also focus on the better together story of using the upcoming Rx v2.0 release with the new C# 5.0 and Visual Basic 11 language features for asynchronous programming. Come and learn how to tame your event processing problems using Rx! Bio: Bart J.F. De Smet is a senior software development engineer in the Cloud Programmability Team at Microsoft. For the last 2,5 years he’s been focused on democratizing data processing problems of all scales, using LINQ as the universal glue. In this role, he’s in charge of the design and development of Reactive Extensions, as well as various yet unannounced projects. Prior to joining the team, Bart worked on a the WPF team for a couple of years, after having joined Microsoft fresh out of university in 2007. During his Master of Computer Science and Civil Engineering studies in Ghent University (Belgium), Bart was active in the Microsoft community and became an MVP for C# in 2003. He’s also the author of the SAMS C# 4.0 Unleashed book, has been blogging for many years, and is a popular speaker at various conferences including TechEd, PDC, MIX, //build/, and several local Microsoft events.