Leveraging GPU processing power from C# : CUDAfy.NET

A few days ago, this awesome library was released that allows you to use the processing power of your graphical processing unit (GPU) for calculations. They say that for certain types of calculations, you can get a 100 fold improvement in performance.... NICE.

I've heard these stories about bitcoin miners that use GPU's for BitCoin mining and I had no idea how they did it. This makes it a walk in the park... Good stuff.

Chocolatey: Machine Package Manager, somewhat like apt-get, but built with Windows in mind.

OK, this is awesome. A colleague of mine pointed out this new thing called Chocolatey. It's a little like 'apt' actually - come to think of it (for Linux people). Because it lets you command line install open-source software, that is taken from an online repository (Git in this case).

You only need to run 1 shell script and from then on you can command line install applications. His idea was to use this in combination with the labs for TFS2012. Go have a look!

Plastic SCM - a distributed version control system with a focus on branching

On one of the .NET Rocks! shows I heard about Plastic SCM, a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) that wants to be different from things like GIT by focussing a lot on branching/merging. They offer a GUI for doing these things - see this screenshot from their website:

Here's a video explaining the process:

Looks really cool, although I'm sceptical whether our company will switch to this thing. Seems to be free for 'small' teams I've heard! Check it out.

Another non-technical Hanselminutes that I really enjoyed

The latest issue of Hanselminutes covers an interview with Garann Means and it talks about developer monoculture. I recognize a lot from the time when I was in University. Scott mentions that he gets a lot of criticism when he's blogging non-technical stuff, but I'm grateful for it, I always enjoy these talks.

He also mentions this book - which sounds really sweet.

Find it here.

Visual Studio 2012 Extension: Code Digger

Browsing Channel 9, I came across a Visual Studio extension called Code Digger. It's a tool that analyses your source code and generates a table with possible input- and output values of your methods. Big drawback: only works on portable libraries.

Here's a video from the creators, explaining how it works:

Interesting Channel 9 talk: Building an Engineering Organization for Continuous Delivery

Here's a nice talk from Brian Harry about DevOps practices and how he and his TFS team moved from a 'waterfallian' model to a more agile model. I watched it and I liked it. It's described as:

Brian Harry shares behind-the-scenes information on how Team Foundation Service is developed and announces exciting additions in his ALM Summit keynote. As of now, Team Foundation Service provides a distributed version control offering with Git repos, and Visual Studio offers full Git integration with Visual Studio 2012 Update (currently available as a CTP release), including the option to use 3rd-party hosts. In a future release, Team Foundation Server will also support Git repos. Developers who want to use distributed version control systems can now get started quickly from within Visual Studio. This expansion of ALM options makes it easier for teams to adopt tools that are best suited to their specific needs.

See it here or use the video below:

.NET Rocks podcast on T4

One of the recent .NET Rocks! Podcasts is an interview with Mårten Rånge . He's like a T4 evangelist - he loves it and uses it a whole lot. I asked him to take a look at my T4 solution and he did! Really nice - he went though it and gave me some feedback. Thanks Mårten

Listen to it here.

Excel tip: enable Analysis Toolpak for easy Excel histograms

After performance testing a WCF service, I got a bunch of execution times for which I wanted to create a histogram. That would of course give me a distribution of the execution times, so I could get an idea of how the service typically performs.

I hadn't found an elegant way of doing this - until I bumped into this feature of Excel, which is hidden by default. It's called Analysis Toolpak and it enables a bunch of statistical analysis do be done very quickly.

Check it out here.