Talking Reactive Extensions

There has been a lot of movement around the Reactive Extensions lately and I thought I’d round them up for you in an easy to find location.  Between the new release and various interviews, there’s a bit to cover.

New Release

Last Friday there was a release of the Reactive Extensions for both .NET and JavaScript for which the release notes can be found here.  On the .NET side of the house, the biggest addition is the addition of IQbservable, which is short of IQueryableObservable.  Just as IObservable is the mathematical dual of IEnumerable, IQbservable is the dual of IQueryable.  Bart de Smet, of the Cloud Programmability Team, explains it in full detail in his Channel 9 white boarding sessions here.

On the JavaScript side of things, there were a few more items of note.  This includes some additional bindings for Dojo, Ext JS, jQuery, MooTools, Prototype and YUI3.  We ship the debug versions of these integrations so that you get an idea of how we did it, but just as well, how you could add more integration points yourself.  One new integration point that I’m very excited about is the Raphael bindings.  If you’re not familiar with Raphael, it is a JavaScript library for simplifying interaction with vector graphics on the web.  I hope to cover more of that shortly on what it is and how we did it.  Lastly, there have been quite a few new operators that have been added in the form of Case, DoWhile, If, For, Let and While.  Each of these will be covered as well coming up.  But by no means are we even close to being done!

JSConf

A few weeks ago, I, along with Jeffrey Van Gogh, attended the preeminent JavaScript conference, JSConf here in Washington, DC.  There, we got to meet some of the best and brightest in the JavaScript community and share ideas, and in our case around event-based and asynchronous patterns in JavaScript.  What was interesting was the talk breakdown between server side and client side JavaScript seemed about a 50-50 split, with a lot of focus on Node.js.  Noticing this trend, Jeffrey presented in the B Track on the Reactive Extensions where he announced our bindings for Node.js.  Rey Bango caught up with us on Sunday to talk to us about the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript which you can view here.  Also, there was a great wrap-up of JSConf on Herding Code with the organizer, Chris Williams, Rey Bango and myself on Herding Code you might want to check out.

Overall, it was a great event and I’d highly recommend attending the upcoming JSConf.EU if you get the chance (although I hear it did sell out). 

Interviews and More

As if you hadn’t heard enough already, we’ve had a few interviews on various podcasts where we dig into the Reactive Extensions for .NET and JavaScript. 

With that, download the Reactive Extensions and give the team feedback!

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