Event report on BSI Bekasi Microsoft Technology Update and explaining Asychronous without coding

Hi guys! While I was preparing for Part 4 and 5 of my blog series about F#, MUGI Jadetabek was organizing event at BSI Bekasi about Microsoft Technology update on 13th October, 2012. It is part of MUGI technology community sharing.

The complete event report is already presented by Wakhid Nusa in this blog entry. Now I’ll focus on my participation: acting as MUGI Jadetabek representative and also helping Nicko to deliver presentation of “Introduction to Visual Studio 2012”.

The number of audiences are quite large, it’s about 200 students with roughly equal numbers of boys and girls. The fun side is, the enthusiasm is overwhelming! It’s quite rare to have this rate of enthusiasm, comparing to previous MUGI gathering on other universities/schools.

Other than Nicko from MUGI, we have Agatha Leonita with Office 2013 and Aji Prasetio with Windows 8 respectively.

Here’s the pictures from the event:

Nicko, Agatha, and Aji Prasetio in the pictures below.

 

I was giving short MUGI history and answering questions about Visual Studio:

 

Now a picture of all MUGI’s speakers with Wakhid Nusa excluding Aji: (because Nicko and I have to go after my Visual Studio and Office 2013 sessions done)

One notable questions was “what asynchronous is” when Nicko was delivering Visual Studio 2012 introduction. Although there’s a minor difficulty in Nicko in explaining asynchronous, I was helping giving analogy of a customer ordering and waiting for his food in a restaurant.

Asynchronous means A – Synchronous, it’s not synchronous. Usually we code in synchronous way, in a sequences in our code. This means:

1. Do something and wait until done
2. After number one done, do something else and also wait until done.
3. Do other things after number 1 done first, and then after number 2.

It is well explained, but what happens when you are in a restaurant?

Do you have to wait for your other customer’s order finished eaten and paid? If any restaurants are like these, the experiences will be unpleasant!

So, basically a restaurant is asynchronous:

1. Waiter taking order from customer
2. Waiter is giving order to the chef
3. While waiting for the chef to complete cooking, waiter can take other orders from other customers but there is has to be a continuation point to signal/notify that the cooking is complete, see below
4. Chef is completing the cooking and notifying the waiter
5. Waiter is taking the cooked cuisine and giving it to the customer in a step one.

So, the experience is pleasant and satisfactory, because the waiter isn’t idle waiting for the cook to be finished and he/she can take other order from other waiting customers!

We have had asynchronous programming model in basic BCL threading, Windows Forms, WPF and ASP.NET. But sadly, it’s not intuitive and easy to write.

Now the horrible experience of writing async code is simplified using async keyword in C# and VB in Visual Studio 2012.

This is a sample of using async to get web content asynchronously: (from MSDN Library)

The code after await getStringTask is the continuation, but it’s quite easier to write because it feel synchronous!

But F# already has this way before VS 2012! It was introduced in F# 1.8 and F# asynchronous workflow was also inspiring async in C# and VB.

This is F# sample from MSDN:

In the sample above, it’s combined with parallel programming with Async.Parallel! Watch async in action in my next blog series about F#, guys!

For more information about async in C# and VB in Visual Studio 2012, visit:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh191443(v=vs.110).aspx

Lastly, keep sharing your knowledge guys! Go MUGI!