Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Which frameworks by Microsoft are not well known and are well worth exploring in depth?

It seems that some Microsoft frameworks are only known by name and reputation, not by content or usefulness. Especially with the rise of open source frameworks they sometimes get a bit unpopular.

Which frameworks by Microsoft are not well known and are well worth exploring in depth? What is their reputation and area of usefulness?

From stackoverflow
  • I haven't used it much, but it's a fascinating topic: the Coordination and Concurrency Runtime. It's part of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio, which is a pain in terms of installation and licensing, but it's a really neat way of looking at concurrency. Parallel Extensions doesn't quite cover the same ground, as far as I can tell - I'm hoping to see the CCR available as a standalone free library at some point.

    The particularly neat aspect from my point of view is representing an asynchronous workflow via continuations in an iterator block. Not as neat as F#, but still pretty nifty.

    Nick Gunn : I'd second this. CCR stands out for supporting safe coordination of asynchronous event-processing across multiple threads. (Incidentally, some of the CCR primitives can be nicely used from within F# as shown here: http://iodyner.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!7B505254340D5E9A!147.entry)
  • Scott Hanseleman has a recent blog post on ELMAH: Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET

    Mauricio Scheffer : not a framework and not coded by Microsoft
  • Microsoft (codename) Phoenix

    Phoenix is an SDK for building compilers, code analysis and optimization tools. When released, it will be used as a back-end for future Microsoft compilers.

    The SDK (pre-release) is available the above link.

    More information available:

    Wikipedia article
    Andy Ayers: Understanding the Phoenix Compiler Framework (channel9 video)

  • I think you should check out the stuff they have on Microsoft Research. Like one of the frameworks i find really awesome is the NaturalSpec which is useful for testing.

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