Ralf Westphal

Ralf Westphal

Biography:

Ralf Westphal has written more then 300 IT publications. He is a recommended IT coach / trainer and a famous speaker on national and international IT Events. He has been elected to be a member of the  Microsoft Regional Director Program from 1998 till 2005 and has become a Microsoft Most Valued Professional in 2005.

"NTSM / Software Transactional Memory and .NET"

Concurrent programming is inevitable if we want to exploit future processor generations in our applications. But despite the technical ease with which we can start threads, wait on signals, and lock objects with the .NET Framework, concurrent programming is still conceptually difficult. Synchronizing multiple threads accessing shared  in-memory data structures is not for the faint of heart. But help is on its way! Software Transactional Memory (STM) promises to make parallel shared data access as easy as concurrent datbasebase programming. Instead of manually locking shared data all access to it just needs to be wrapped in in-memory transactions. The session will demonstrate an Open Source C# implementation of the STM concept as a pragmatic solution.

"SimpleDB - A Database in the clouds..."

A databases as SaaS? Yes, that's possible in the opinion of Amazon, that doesn't sell only books since a long time. SimpleDB is a database accessible via http and XML and that is subject to a charge. But SimpleDB does not follow the relational model for data persistence. It implements a tuple space with a respective API so that SQL is out of place. How and why can such a database be useful?! Rald Westphal explains the SimpleDB Data Model and demonstrates the usage online and local with the service oriented API of his Open Source Implementation NSimpleDB.