For the uninitiated, Code Camp is a free development conference that is most typically sponsored by Microsoft then staffed by both local volunteers and up-and-comers on the national / international developer circuit.  The received truth is that they’re not quite as good as the more well-known conferences (i.e. Build, VSLive, etc.) but I have found them in my own experience to be extremely good, especially in terms of learning actual coding techniques as opposed to simply hearing simple announcements.

By way of disclosure, it’s important to note that I will be speaking at the next Code Camp NYC (Saturday, November 23, 2013, from 8:30 AM until 5:00PM), so I am more than a little biased.  My topic will be:

Supercharge your apps with TPL Dataflow

The TPL Dataflow Library allows mere mortals to craft CPU-intensive and I/O-intensive applications that support high throughput and low latency while tightly controlling memory usage.  This code-centric session will explain how TPL Dataflow works (along with a number of related technologies, such as async / await), the advantages of TPL Dataflow over more traditional parallelizing constructs, and most import of all, how to supercharge your own apps.  As drive the power of TPL Dataflow home, I’ll also show you how to write a blazingly fast web-crawler in less than 200 lines of code.

While I’m in a disclosing mood, I just finished the above described web-crawler, called PodFetch.  It is indeed blazingly fast.  On the other hand, I couldn’t stop myself from adding a number of refinements (like colorized logging) so it came out to something like 350 lines of code.  Never fear, though, because though the magic of JIT, the code squeezes down to a mere 59 lines of MSIL, which by at least my count is less than 200! 🙂

You can download the code from GIT.  If you attend Code Camp NYC, be sure to stop by and say hi!