Just a quick note to say that I have updated the JSON serializers benchmark to use the latest Nuget versions of ServiceStack.Text, Json.Net and JsonFX. I have also included the JSON and BSON serializers from the MongoDB C# Driver in the test, and since BSON is a binary format I have included protobuf-net as a [...]

Amazon’s DynamoDB is a wonderful product – scalable, durable, fast, with predictable latency numbers unlike SimpleDB. However, the only gripe I have with DynamoDB is that there is no built-in support for a query language, which makes life rather difficult when you want to perform a query or a scan against the data you have [...]

In general, when you see async void in your code it’s bad news, because: you can’t wait for its completion (as mentioned in this post already) any unhandled exceptions will terminate your process (ouch!)   Suppose you have a timer event that fires every once in a while and you want to do some asynchronous [...]

With the official release of .Net 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012, I suspect many .Net developers will be rushing to rewrite their data access or network layers (amongst many many other things!) to take advantage of the new async-await (see the excellent 101 examples here) language feature in C#, which means you’ll likely be working [...]

In Erlang, we have the Supervisor behaviour which makes it very easy to provide the means to monitor and restart a whole network of workers and other supervisors based on some configured strategy. The MailboxProcessor (aka agents) in F# doesn’t come with the same higher-level abstractions (such as Erlang’s gen_server, gen_fsm behaviours) by default, but [...]