On last Black Friday, I purchased a 50-inch 4K HDR10 smart TV with only $150. I use it as monitor for my computer. I didn’t find a walk through tutorial for the whole HDR (High Dynamic Range) setup, so here I am sharing the steps.

Asynchronous function can improve the responsiveness and scalability of the application and service. C# 5.0 introduces asynchronous function to greatly simplify the async programming model.

Table of contents

• Install Windows preview
• Install WSL 2 preview
• Install Nvidia driver preview and CUDA toolkit
• Run CUDA sample application
• Install Docker and Nvidia container toolkit
• Run CUDA containers
• Troubleshoot
• Run WSL + CUDA + Docker + Jupyter + TensorFlow
• Encoding and decoding video with GPU in WSL?

GPU support is the most requested feature in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). It is available in WSL 2.0 through Windows Insiders program. And Nvidia CUDA is supported. The following diagram shows the WDDM model supporting CUDA user mode driver running inside Linux guest:

So the popular Linux AI frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc. can work with WSL with CUDA acceleration:

This article walks through the installation of Windows, WSL, CUDA in WSL, and Docker in WSL.

Install Windows preview

First, you must enable “Optional diagnostic data”, otherwise Windows cannot join Windows Insiders.

Then, join Windows Insiders program with Microsoft account (an account can be created if you don’t have one: https://insider.windows.com/). The channel must be Dev:

Then run Windows Update. It will download the pre=release installer. Windows will restart and reinstall.

Install WSL 2 preview

In Windows, make sure the following Windows features are enabled:

• WSL:
  dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux /all /norestart
• Virtual machine platform:
  dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:VirtualMachinePlatform /all /norestart

Now restart Windows, then Windows will have WSL and the wsl command line tool. Run Windows Update again to get the latest WSL 2. When this is done, in the update history, it must show 4.19.121 or later:

Then manually install this patch: https://wslstorestorage.blob.core.windows.net/wslblob/wsl_update_x64.msi. And then run the following command as administrator to update the kernel to the latest version:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>wsl --update
Checking for updates...
Downloading updates...
Installing updates...
This change will take effect on the next full restart of WSL. To force a restart, please run 'wsl --shutdown'.
Kernel version: 5.4.72

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A decade ago, I blogged that I switched my code font from Courier New to Consolas. They are both monospaced. The difference is:

• Courier New is an old font introduced in Windows 3.1.
• Consolas is introduced with Windows Vista/Office 2007/Visual Studio 2010. It always uses ClearType, which is designed for LCD screens and other flat panels which arrange their pixels in vertical stripes of red, green and blue.

SQL Server LocalDB is a minimal SQL Server database engine, it can be installed and used with zero configuration.

When you build an application with JavaScript, you always want to modularize your code. However, JavaScript language was initially invented for simple form manipulation, with no built-in features like module or namespace. In years, tons of technologies are invented to modularize JavaScript. This article discusses all mainstream terms, patterns, libraries, syntax, and tools for JavaScript modules.

I uploaded a NuGet package of Microsoft Concurrency Visualizer SDK: ConcurrencyVisualizer. Microsoft Concurrency Visualizer is an extension tool for Visual Studio. It is a great tool for performance profiling and multithreading execution visualization. It also has a SDK library to be invoked by code and draw markers and spans in the timeline. I used it to visualize sequential LINQ and Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) execution in my Functional Programming and LINQ tutorials. For example, array.Where(…).Select(…) sequential LINQ query and array.AsParallel().Where(…).Select(…) Parallel LINQ query can be visualized as following spans:

TransientFaultHandling.Core is retry library for transient error handling. It is ported from Microsoft Enterprise Library’s TransientFaultHandling library, a library widely used with .NET Framework. The retry pattern APIs are ported to .NET Core/.NET Standard, with outdated configuration API updated, and new retry APIs added for convenience.

Introduction

With this library, the old code of retry logic based on Microsoft Enterprise Library can be ported to .NET Core/.NET Standard without modification:

EntityFramework.Functions library implements Entity Framework code first support for:

Monad is a powerful structure, with the LINQ support in C# language, monad enables chaining operations to build fluent workflow, which can be pure. With these features, monad can be used to manage I/O, state changes, exception handling, shared environment, logging/tracing, and continuation, etc., in the functional paradigm.

As fore mentioned endofunctor category can be monoidal (the entire category. Actually, an endofunctor In the endofunctor category can be monoidal too. This kind of endofunctor is called monad. Monad is another important algebraic structure in category theory and LINQ. Formally, monad is an endofunctor equipped with 2 natural transformations:

Given monoidal categories (C, ⊗, I_C) and (D, ⊛, I_D), a strong lax monoidal functor is a functor F: C → D equipped with:

A functor is the mapping from 1 object to another object, with a “Select” ability to map 1 morphism to another morphism. A bifunctor (binary functor), as the name implies, is the mapping from 2 objects and from 2 morphisms. Giving category C, D and E, bifunctor F from category C, D to E is a structure-preserving morphism from C, D to E, denoted F: C × D → E:

If F: C → D and G: C → D are both functors from categories C to category D, the mapping from F to G is called natural transformation and denoted α: F ⇒ G. α: F ⇒ G is actually family of morphisms from F to G, For each object X in category C, there is a specific morphism α_X: F(X) → G(X) in category D, called the component of α at X. For each morphism m: X → Y in category C and 2 functors F: C → D, G: C → D, there is a naturality square in D:

In category theory, functor is a mapping from category to category. Giving category C and D, functor F from category C to D is a structure-preserving morphism from C to D, denoted F: C → D:

Monoid is an important algebraic structure in category theory. A monoid M is a set M equipped with a binary operation ⊙ and a special element I, denoted 3-tuple (M, ⊙, I), where

Category theory is a theoretical framework to describe abstract structures and relations in mathematics, first introduced by Samuel Eilenberg and Saunders Mac Lane in 1940s. It examines mathematical concepts and properties in an abstract way, by formalizing them as collections of items and their relations. Category theory is abstract, and called "general abstract nonsense" by Norman Steenrod; It is also general, therefore widely applied in many areas in mathematics, physics, and computer science, etc. For programming, category theory is the algebraic theory of types and functions, and also the rationale and foundation of LINQ and any functional programming. This chapter discusses category theory and its important concepts, including category, morphism, natural transform, monoid, functor, and monad, etc. These general abstract concepts will be demonstrated with intuitive diagrams and specific C# and LINQ examples. These knowledge also helps building a deep understanding of functional programming in C# or other languages, since any language with types and functions is a category-theoretic structure.