Jeff Certain on Threading - Background Worker Process

Intended Audience:
Software developers with some prior experience with .NET.

Description:
As manufacturers place more cores on each chip, the advantages of multi-threading your applications become more compelling. However, multithreading your applications also introduces additional complexity and risk, such as cross-thread marshalling of data, concurrency issues and broken iterators. This talk will discuss the basics of threading, including some of the common pitfalls and misconceptions. We'll also explore the BackgroundWorker class and demonstrate how to use it to provide simple multi-threading for your applications.

Presenter:
Jeff Certain is a Microsoft MVP (VB .NET) and is a software team lead at EDM International. As such, he is primarily involved in data-centric applications, be they web apps, Windows apps or mobile (PDA) apps. Jeff has been using VB .NET since it's initial release in 2001.

Topics:
Threading - Background Worker Process

Links:

What is on the Calendar?

Description:
Fit is an automated requirements validation and verification testing toolkit. In the context of software requirements, Validation is about asking the question "Are we building the right product?" while Verification is about asking "Are we building the product right?" Fit4Net helps to answer both these questions by providing a standard way for business users, in collaboration with the software development team, to define in concrete terms what they expect of the target system.

Using Fit, requirements are at least partially specified using tables. The framework provides support for parsing the tables, which are then used as inputs for tests written by the software developers. As such, Fit supports the Validation process, by ensuring that functionality is defined in such a way that it is unambiguous to both client and developer and supports Verification by providing the infrastructure to test the implementation against these requirements in an automated fashion.

The greatest strength of Fit, is the simplicity of the tests, and their accessibility to the business users. Non-technical users can edit the test inputs, and run the tests themselves, providing additional input in the form of boundary conditions, unusual conditions, or failing conditions, to ensure that the requirements cover as many scenarios as possible.

Presenter:
Harley Green is a consultant with reVision, Inc - a software consultancy serving Federal and Local Government clients, as well as commercial clients, nationwide. I have been a software developer since 2000, and have been using FIT, and associated frameworks since I first stumbled across them 3 years ago. I am the author of a new .net port of Fit that attempts to improve the user experience using a more consistent approach to writing fixtures.