Tanzim Saqib - Microsoft MVP, ASP.NET

Cassini is now an open source, portable and redistributable web server. This light-weight Microsoft’s source available web server is used to be shipped with Visual Studio as integrated development server. I have revived Cassini in version 4.0 with:

• new cool UI
• support for multiple sites
• configuration driven
• easy deploy
• logging
• manageable design patterns
• portability
• harnessing full C# 4.0 capabilities including new Task Parallel Library.

This is going to stay free forever with a Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) license. There are many usage of this tiny 160KB only web server which makes it enterprise-ready, coming up very soon. Stay tuned.

Feel free to join the team: http://cassini.googlecode.com/

I spoke at Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Community Launch in Dhaka on May 8, 2010. I presented core C# concepts that many developers tend to avoid like delegates, Action, Lambda Expressions. I discussed about improvements in C# 4.0 and also talked about Task Parallel Library at length. There is a companion article for this. I had fun answering the Q&A session.

Here are a few photos from the ceremony.

Here is the slide that I showed.

The slide can be seen full screen and downloaded from here.

Task Parallel Library gives you the convenience to turn existing sequential code into parallel branches, which may result into significant performance boost since all the available processors are being utilized. Although ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem is still there and can serve you the same as before, TPL is a more organized library which has richer APIs that support waiting, continuations, better exception handling, and so on. It is available at System.Threading.Tasks namespace. I have just written this article which tells you how you can start doing it: "Parallelizing Windows Applications in .NET 4.0".