Axum!

I've been on a bit of a hiatus, both from this blog and from doing any major work on my Codeplex projects, since around April; guess the day job's been taking up all my valuable coding time :-D.

But a few days ago, I downloaded the latest version of Axum (now v0.2), Microsoft's new .NET language/incubation project for introducing actor-based, highly-scalable and massively concurrent code to the .NET framework, and thought I'd post some of my experiences. I first heard about this back in November 2008 at TechEd EMEA, when it was called Maestro, and I was really excited - the work I'd been doing on Lite was in the same vein, trying to make distributed, concurrent code both trivial, implicit and powerful for programmers to use, whilst retaining all the good stuff that you get with .NET. Since the first CTP came out, I've been converting a few of my projects and writing some sandbox code to find out what works, and what doesn't, in the Axum programming model.

I don't want to get to much into the design philosophy, as it's fully explored elsewhere on the web, particularly on the Axum blog (here); instead, I'll be uploading code snippets that do interesting things or exploit the features of the language, and useful code patterns for developing in Axum. So yeah, expect some Axum-related goodness in the next few posts. In the meantime, I'd recommend downloading the preview, trying out some experiments of your own and giving the dev team feedback; as an incubation project, they need all the community support they can get.