(This is being written on Thursday evening, but won’t be posted until Friday morning, just to explain any apparent oddities in timing. Quite appropriate, given the topic.)

I’m currently at TechEd in Barcelona, representing Iterative Training and generally trying to raise our profile a bit. (Mentioning the book to everyone I meet doesn’t hurt either.) All the sessions I’ve been to so far have been pretty good (or better) – but the real treat was hearing Joe Duffy speak. In a single session, he covered threading from why it’s necessary (and becoming more so) to some of the details of the memory model. Obviously this meant that for any single person, either some of the talk would be already known or some of the talk would be way beyond them – but even so, it had a really good feeling to it. We saw a little bit of what’s coming up in ParallelFX – and although Joe can’t say at the moment whether it has any of the Coordination and Concurrency Runtime stuff in it, what he presented certainly sounded pretty similar. Oh, and the CTP will be released really soon, with any luck. (I really hope so – I’ve got a sample in my book which I need to check before it goes to print!)

Anyway, the bottom line is that I’m still completely in awe of Joe. I don’t know his age, but I’m sure he’s not that much older than me – but his confidence and authority on what is fundamentally a massive and difficult topic is incredible.

Tomorrow should be a lot of fun – it’s a shorter day than today, but it looks like I might finally get to learn some F#…