You’ve probably been at a restaurant and knew music was playing in the background but, not the music you wanted to hear. So, you just tuned it out rather than listen to it. Well, SoundJuke from Trend Music is a game changer in that regard. It puts full control over the music you hear on a dashboard hosted on your smartphone. You can compose a personal playlist through SoundJuke or use one of the standard playlists that the app shows. These prepared playlists are updated periodically, so you’re n...

During the recent CodeRage X online technical conference, I showed some C++ demo applications in the C++ track that use the System.Threading unit and the Parallel Programming Library that are included in C++Builder 10 Seattle. Leveraging the libraries and techniques will help you create responsive user experiences for your desktop and mobile applications. You can watch the demos on the EmbarcaderoTechNet YouTube channel and download the source code for the projects on EDN's CodeCentral...

Embarcadero Technology Partner Spotlight - OmniThread Library OmniThread Library - Primoz Gabrijelcic - http://www.thedelphigeek.com/ Thursday, September 3, 2015 http://www.omnithreadlibrary.com/ YouTube video replay - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1ZsmnszWDU   OmniThreadLibrary is simple to use threading library for Delphi. Currently, versions 2007, 2009, 2010, XE, XE2, XE3, XE4, XE5, XE6, XE7, XE8, and 10 Seattle are supported. OmniThreadLibrary is an open source projec...

You can watch the replays of the CodeRage 9 C++ track sessions on YouTube. These sessions will help you modernize your VCL applications, learn more about multi-device and mobile development using FireMonkey, connect with SQL databases using FireDAC, build enterprise class mobile applications with Enterprise Mobility Services, add speed to your VCL and FireMonkey applications using the new Parallel Programming Library, become a better C++ programmer by learning from some of the industry's top exp...

I've created a short video that shows Marco Cantu talking about and demoing the new XE7 Parallel Programming Library at the recent RAD Studio XE7 First Look webinar. You can find the video on our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8S5b0peu7U. Stephen Ball has written 3 recent blogs giving an overview of the Parallel Programming Library, how to use parallel tasks and how to use parallel Futures. QUICK INTRODUCTION TO PARALLEL PROGRAMMING WITH XE7  - http://delphiaba...

RAD Studio, Delphi and C++Builder XE7 are available today!   Get the must-have upgrade of the award winning, multi-device development solution for connected apps on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, gadgets and wearables. PLUS! Keep building, evolving, and extending your Windows applications using the updated VCL! Extend existing Windows Applications: Embrace the expanding world of devices including phones, tablets, gadgets, wearables and more, all within a single IDE! Deliver Highly Connec...

So far we’ve had “Testing synchronization primitives” and “Writing a ‘self-monitoring’ thread-pool.” Let’s build on those topics, and discuss what to do with exceptions that occur within a scheduled work item within a thread pool. My view is that exceptions should be caught and held for later inspection, or re-raised at some synchronization point. What do you think should happen to the exceptions? Should they silently disappear, tear-down the entire application, or should some mechanism be in pl...

Let’s start thinking about thread pools. How do you manage a general purpose thread pool in the face of no-so-well-written-code? For instance, a task dispatched into the thread pool never returns, effectively locking that thread from ever being recycled. How do you monitor this? How long do you wait before spooling out a new thread? Do you keep a “monitor thread” that periodically checks if a thread has been running longer than some (tunable) value? What are the various techniques for addressing...

I’m going to try a completely different approach to this post. I’ll post a question and simply let the discussion ensue. I would even encourage the discussion to spill over to the public newsgroups/forums. Question for today is: How can you effectively unit-test synchronization primitives for correctness or more generally, how would you test a concurrency library? Let’s see how far we can get down this rabbit hole ;-)....

The Delphi Parallel Library (DPL) tends to occupy a lot of my otherwise idle "thought" time. DPL has been redesigned in my head more times than I can count.  The good news is that it is conceptually beginning to actually take some shape and is finding a direction.  As I've stated before, a lot of the concepts behind the DPL are taken from Intel's TBB and Microsoft's TPL. When I started down this road, it all began as an investigation into various ways of implementing a thread pool.&nbs...