Irish weather enables people to build energy efficient data centres

Two guys(Tom and Adam) are building a data centre in Cork. To be honest I was surprised that Cork needs a data centre but apparently there is none outside of Dublin and some companies need to use 2 data centres that are at least 30 miles far from each other. The next thing that was kind of new to me is that you can build such a facility in a completely transparent way that your customers know exactly what they pay for. And the last but the least surprise was that Irish weather plus a bit of innovative thinking can give such huge savings in terms of power consumption. From now on if someone complains about Irish weather I will tell him/her the story of that efficient data centre. It might help :).

LINQ query versus compiled LINQ query

Rico Mariani changed his position a few months ago but he still manages to provide his Performance Quizzes from time to time. Today he explains the difference between LINQ queries and compiled LINQ queries. It's obvious that one should cache as much as possible because in most cases is better to pay a high price once then a slightly reduced one many times. But the interesting part of the post is the way how Microsoft came up with their current implementation of compiled LINQ queries. Nearly every good performance solution is a matter of realizing that being very generic doesn't pay off. Crazy about performance topics? Go and solve Rico latest quiz. Once you are done check if you are right.

Ireland is not a hero?

It looks like there will not be a launch event of Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in Dublin. The registration page does not list Ireland and I suppose that this years is someone else turn.

Extensibility, extensibility and once again extensibility

It looks like the new MVC framework from Microsoft is very extensible which is great. I hate frameworks that have no built-in extensibility points and basically force you to do things their way. WCF is a perfect example that proves that extensibility can be very powerful and to be honest this particular feature has saved my life :) a few times.

ASPNIX thanks for bringing my web site down

My blog was down for nearly 72 hours. No response from the support and they phone is "temporary out of service". The name of the company that still hosts my web site is ASPNIX.  I suppose no more comments needed. I need to find a better hosting company soon enough. I will describe the whole issue later on.

LINQ and its diverse incarnations

LINQ as a concept is highly extensible and every now and then a new LINQ to WhatEverYouWant gets announced. Just a few examples to show how fast people are adopting this technology: LINQ to LLBLGEN, LINQ to NHibernate, LINQ to Filckr, LINQ to Amazon, etc. Within a few days I've come across 3 more projects:

• SyncLinq - it returns collections that implement INotifyCollectionChanged which lets you track changes
• PLinq - it lets you specify that a given LINQ statement should be executed concurrently and it's up to the runtime to decide how many CPUs will be used
• DryadLinq - the same as PLinq, just replace CPU with PC, basically it lets you specify that your query should be executed on many machines

It looks like LINQ is a powerful platform itself. It has enabled people to create many different levels of abstractions that are based on nearly the same syntax. It's amazing because if I want to stay close to bare metal I can go for Linq, if I want to get some additional services like change tracking I can go for SyncLinq. If I want to take advantage of my N > 1 cores without messing with threads I can go for PLinq and finally if I have N > 1 machines that nobody uses :) I would definitely go for DryadLinq. Diversity in its best shape.

I can use Microsoft Surface but I can not nest directories as deep as I want

Microsoft Research is surprising us nearly every month. Just to name a few of their great products: PhotoSynth and Microsoft Surface. But you know what every day I hit the #$%@ limitation on the length of the path. 260 characters and that's all I can get in the .NET framework. Guys, can we back up a bit and solve the basic problems?
Resharper - click on the picture to see the details:

MsBuild - click on the picture to see the details: