I've been watching some very excited tweets go past about concurrency improvements in .NET 4.0.  I've got to say, I'm quite looking forward to hearing about this once the NDAs drop away (not an MVP, nor am I likely to be).  Retlang is pretty much the only game in town for concurrency right now, and it's quite hard explaining to people the problem it's trying to solve.  The standard question is "what's wrong with using Threads"?  The work the Maestro team is doing looks exciting as well, although I'm a bit dubious about the benefits of a language rather than...

I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a technology that looked great in the sample, but didn't hold up when I took it for a proper test drive.  Mike Rettig, on the other hand, has really thought through the use cases.  So when you try to take a sample program and hit the real world, you discover he's been there before you.  Here's some highlights: Everything implements interfaces.  You can mock or stub pretty much everything.  (You might want to create your own abstract factory, though.) Not only does...

The Retlang wiki is a bit short on the sort of messy examples that I find useful when learning a product, so I thought I'd write one of my own.  The following is a 200-line web spider.  I'll go through it and explain how it works and why you'd build it like this.  I recently used techniques similar to this to get a FIX processor to run 30 times faster.  Seriously.  Retlang's that good. Five minute introduction to Retlang Here's how Retlang works: A Context is a Thread/Queue pair.  That is to say, a thread with an associated queue. ...

Well, in the words of Scott Hanselman "We'll see how long this lasts.".  Anyway, I should start as I mean to go on by providing some code that's actually useful. I've been using Mike Rettig's Retlang library a fair bit recently, and have nothing but praise for it.  I'll go into more detail about why it's great at a later date, but here I'll just detail a problem that I encountered and how to solve it. Let's say that you've got a system that writes to the database and you need to bring the database down.  You need to stop...