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  • Debug.Assert replacement for Phone and Store apps

    - by Daniel Moth
    I don’t know about you, but all my code is, and always has been, littered with Debug.Assert statements. I think it all started way back in my (short-lived, but impactful to me) Eiffel days, when I was applying Design by Contract. Anyway, I can’t live without Debug.Assert. Imagine my dismay when I upgraded my Windows Phone 7.x app (Translator By Moth) to Windows Phone 8 and discovered that my Debug.Assert statements would not display anything on the target and would not break in the debugger any longer! Luckily, the solution was simple and in this post I share it with you – feel free to teak it to meet your needs. Steps to use Add a new code file to your project, delete all its contents, and paste in the code from MyDebug.cs Perform a global search in your solution replacing Debug.Assert with MyDebug.Assert Build solution and test Now, I do not know why this functionality was broken, but I do know that it exhibits the same broken characteristics for Windows Store apps. There is a simple workaround there to use Contract.Assert which does display a message and offers an option to break in the debugger (although it doesn’t output the message to the Output window). Because I plan on code sharing between Phone and Windows 8 projects, I prefer to have the conditional compilation centralized, so I added the Contract.Assert workaround directly in MyDebug class, so that you can use this class for both platforms – enjoy and enhance! Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Best of "The Moth" 2012

    - by Daniel Moth
    As with previous years (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) I’d like to wish you a Happy New Year and share a quick review of my blog posts from 2012 (plus speculate on my 2013 blog focus). 1. Like 2011, my professional energy in 2012 was dominated by C++ AMP including articles, blog posts, demos, slides, and screencasts. I summarized that over two posts on the official team blog that I linked to from my blog post here titled: “The last word on C++ AMP”, which also subtly hinted at my change of role which I confirmed in my other post titled “Visual Studio Continued Excitement”. 2. Even before I moved to the Visual Studio Diagnostics team in September, earlier in the year I had started sharing blog posts with my thoughts on that space, something I expect to continue in the new year. You can read some of that in these posts: The way I think about Diagnostic tools, Live Debugging, Attach to Process in Visual Studio, Start Debugging in Visual Studio, Visual Studio Exceptions dialogs. 3. What you should also expect to see more of is thoughts, tips, checklists, etc around Professional Communication and on how to be more efficient and effective with that, e.g. Link instead of Attaching, Sending Outlook Invites, Responding to Invites, and OOF checklist. 4. As always, I sometimes share random information, and noteworthy from 2012 is the one where I outlined the Visual Studio versioning story (“Visual Studio 11 not 2011”, and after that post VS 11 was officially baptized VS2012) and the one on “How I Record Screencasts”. Looking back, unlike 2011 there were no posts in 2012 related to device development, e.g. for Windows Phone. Expect that to be rectified in 2013 as I hope to find more time for such coding… stay tuned by subscribing using the link on the left. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Attend my GTC sessions

    - by Daniel Moth
    The last GTC conference in the US was 2 years ago and I was there as an attendee. You may recall from that blog post that we were running UX studies at the time. It really feels great 2 years later, to be back at GTC presenting two sessions on C++ AMP, demonstrating our progress that includes input from those early studies. If you are attending GTC (in person or virtually later), be sure to watch my two-part session. Part 1 is S0242 on Wednesday 5pm and part 2 is S0244 on Thursday 10am. Here is the shared abstract for both parts: Harnessing GPU Compute with C++ AMP C++ AMP is an open specification for taking advantage of accelerators like the GPU. In this session we will explore the C++ AMP implementation in Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Beta. After a quick overview of the technology understanding its goals and its differentiation compared with other approaches, we will dive into the programming model and its modern C++ API. This is a code heavy, interactive, two-part session, where every part of the library will be explained. Demos will include showing off the richest parallel and GPU debugging story on the market, in the upcoming Visual Studio release. See you there! Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Start Debugging in Visual Studio

    - by Daniel Moth
    Every developer is familiar with hitting F5 and debugging their application, which starts their app with the Visual Studio debugger attached from the start (instead of attaching later). This is one way to achieve step 1 of the Live Debugging process. Hitting F5, F11, Ctrl+F10 and the other ways to start the process under the debugger is covered in this MSDN "How To". The way you configure the debugging experience, before you hit F5, is by selecting the "Project" and then the "Properties" menu (Alt+F7 on my keyboard bindings). Dependent on your project type there are different options, but if you browse to the Debug (or Debugging) node in the properties page you'll have a way to select local or remote machine debugging, what debug engines to use, command line arguments to use during debugging etc. Currently the .NET and C++ project systems are different, but one would hope that one day they would be unified to use the same mechanism and UI (I don't work on that product team so I have no knowledge of whether that is a goal or if it will ever happen). Personally I like the C++ one better, here is what it looks like (and it is described on this MSDN page): If you were following along in the "Attach to Process" blog post, the equivalent to the "Select Code Type" dialog is the "Debugger Type" dropdown: that is how you change the debug engine. Some of the debugger properties options appear on the standard toolbar in VS. With Visual Studio 11, the Debug Type option has been added to the toolbar If you don't see that in your installation, customize the toolbar to show it - VS 11 tends to be conservative in what you see by default, especially for the non-C++ Visual Studio profiles. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • .NET access to the GPU for compute purposes

    - by Daniel Moth
    In the distant past I talked about GPGPU and Microsoft's then approach of DirectCompute. Since then of course we now have C++ AMP coming out with Visual Studio 11, so there is a mainstream easier way for developers to access the GPU for compute purposes, using C++. The question occasionally arises of how can a .NET developer access the GPU for compute purposes from their C# (or VB) code. The answer is by interoping from the managed code to a native DLL and in the native DLL use C++ AMP. As a long term .NET developer myself, I can tell you this is straightforward. Sure, there could have been a managed wrapper for C++ AMP, but honestly that is the reason we have interop – it doesn't make much sense to invest resources to solve a problem that is already solved (most developer customers would prefer investments in other areas of Visual Studio!). Besides, interoping from C# to C++ is much easier than interoping to some of the other older approaches of GPGPU programming ;-) To help you get started with the interop approach, Igor Ostrovsky has previously shared the "Hello World" version of interoping from C# to C++ AMP in his blog post: How to use C++ AMP from C# …we then were asked specifically about how to interop from C# to C++ AMP in a Metro style application on Windows 8, so Igor delivered again with this post: How to use C++ AMP from C# using WinRT Have fun! Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Links to C++ AMP and other content

    - by Daniel Moth
    A few links you may be interested in. This week was a big week for Microsoft with the unveiling of the developer story for Windows 8 Metro-style apps. The recorded sessions are available on channel9. Note that you can use C++ AMP in both Metro and desktop apps, and in fact even on Windows 7. Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview is now available. To download it, here is a link to a link plus context. As I previously shared, I was also speaking at BUILD on C++ AMP, and here is a direct link to that recording. Kate Gregory has started a book on C++ AMP and she has graciously shared the first 1-2 draft chapters for free online – get the link from her blog post which is also where you can leave her feedback. As Yossi Levanoni (the architect of C++ AMP), posted on our team blog, the C++ AMP article that he and I co-authored is now available at Dr Dobbs. Important reminder: Questions on C++ AMP should be posted at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/parallelcppnative/threads Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Visual Studio Continued Excitement

    - by Daniel Moth
    As you know Visual Studio 2012 RTM’d and then became available in August (Soma’s blog posts told you that here and here), and the VS2012 launch was earlier this month (Soma also told you that here). Every time a release of Visual Studio takes place I am very excited, since this has been my development tool of choice for almost my entire career (from many years before I joined Microsoft). I am doubly excited with this release since it is the second version of Visual Studio that I have worked on and contributed major features to, now that I’ve been in the developer division (DevDiv) for over 4 years. Additionally, I am very excited about the new era that VS2012 starts with VSUpdate for continued customer value: instead of waiting for the next major version of VS to get new features, there is new infrastructure to enable friction-free updates. The first update will ship before the end of this year, and you can read more about it at Brian’s blog post. I also noticed that a CTP of the first quarterly update is available to download here. In the last two months, the VS2012 family of products we all worked on in DevDiv shipped, coinciding with the end of the Microsoft financial/review year, and naturally followed by a couple of organizational changes (e.g. see Jason’s blog post)… On a personal level, this meant that I was very lucky to have an opportunity present itself to me that I simply could not turn down, so I grabbed it! I’ll still be working on Visual Studio, but not in the Parallel Computing part of the C++ team; instead I will be PM-leading the VS Diagnostics team… Stay tuned for details of what is coming in that space, in the VS updates and in the next major VS release, as I am able to share them… Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Attend my Tech Ed 2014 session: Debugging Tips and Tricks

    - by Daniel Moth
    Just a week away, at Tech Ed 2014 NA in Houston Texas, I will be giving a demo presentation that you will not want to miss (assuming you code in Visual Studio). Add it to your calendar now: DEV-B352 Debugging Tips and Tricks in Visual Studio 2013 (link) Monday, May 12 1:15-2:30 PM, Room: General Assembly C As a developer, regardless of your programming language or the platform that you target, you use the debugger on a daily basis. Come to this all-demo session to learn how to make the most of the Visual Studio debugger, and hence be more productive and effective in your everyday development. We tour almost all of the debugger surface and many of its commands, throwing in tips and tricks as we go along, and also calling out what is brand new in the latest version of the debugger in Microsoft Visual Studio 2013. Whatever your experience level, you are guaranteed to leave with new knowledge of debugger features that you will want to use immediately when you are back at your computer!   I am also co-presenting another session later in the week. DEV-B313 Diagnosing Issues in Windows Phone 8.1 XAML Applications Using Visual Studio 2013 (link) Thursday, May 15 10:15-11:30 AM, Room: 340 Come to this demo-driven session to learn how to use the latest diagnostic tools in Visual Studio 2013 to make your Windows Phone 8.1 XAML apps reliable, fast, and efficient. Learn how to make the most of existing capabilities in the debugger as well as new debugging features for diagnosing correctness issues. Also, see the Visual Studio Performance and Diagnostics hub in action with its performance analysis tools for diagnosing CPU usage, memory usage, and energy consumption. The techniques covered in this session apply equally well for Windows Store apps as well as Windows Phone Store apps, so all your device development needs will be covered.   Links to both sessions from my Tech Ed speaker page. See you there! Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • MyMessageBox for Phone and Store apps

    - by Daniel Moth
    I am sharing a class I use for both my Windows Phone 8 and Windows Store app projects. Background and my requirements For my Windows Phone 7 projects two years ago I wrote an improved custom MessageBox class that preserves the well-known MessageBox interface while offering several advantages. I documented those and shared it for Windows Phone 7 here: Guide.BeginShowMessageBox wrapper. Aside: With Windows Phone 8 we can now use the async/await feature out of the box without taking a dependency on additional/separate pre-release software. As I try to share code between my existing Windows Phone 8 projects and my new Windows Store app projects, I wanted to preserve the calling code, so I decided to wrap the WinRT MessageDialog class in a custom class to present the same MessageBox interface to my codebase. BUT. The MessageDialog class has to be called with the await keyword preceding it (which as we know is viral) which means all my calling code will also have to use await. Which in turn means that I have to change my MessageBox wrapper to present the same interface to the shared codebase and be callable with await… for both Windows Phone projects and Windows Store app projects. Solution The solution is what the requirements above outlined: a single code file with a MessageBox class that you can drop in your project, regardless of whether it targets Windows Phone 8, or Windows 8 Store apps or both. Just call any of its static Show functions using await and dependent on the overload check the return type to see which button the user chose.// example from http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/GuideBeginShowMessageBox-Wrapper.aspx if (await MyMessageBox.Show("my message", "my caption", "ok, got it", "that sucks") == MyMessageBoxResult.Button1) { // Do something Debug.WriteLine("OK"); } The class can be downloaded from the bottom of my older blog post. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • The last word on C++ AMP...

    - by Daniel Moth
    Well, not the last word, but the last blog post I plan to do here on that topic. Over the last 12 months, I have published 45 blog posts related to C++ AMP on the Parallel Programming in Native Code, and the rest of the team has published even more. Occasionally I'll link to some of them from my own blog here, but today I decided to stop doing that - so if you relied on my personal blog pointing you to C++ AMP content, it is time you subscribed to the msdn blog. I will continue to blog about other topics here of course, so stay tuned. So, for the last time, I encourage you to read the latest two blog posts I published on the team blog bringing together essential reading material on C++ AMP Learn C++ AMP - a collection of links to take you from zero to hero. Present on C++ AMP - a walkthrough on how to give a presentation including slides. Got questions on C++ AMP? Hit the msdn forum! Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Attach to Process in Visual Studio

    - by Daniel Moth
    One option for achieving step 1 in the Live Debugging process is attaching to an already running instance of the process that hosts your code, and this is a good place for me to talk about debug engines. You can attach to a process by selecting the "Debug" menu and then the "Attach To Process…" menu in Visual Studio 11 (Ctrl+Alt+P with my keyboard bindings), and you should see something like this screenshot: I am not going to explain this UI, besides being fairly intuitive, there is good documentation on MSDN for the Attach dialog. I do want to focus on the row of controls that starts with the "Attach to:" label and ends with the "Select..." button. Between them is the readonly textbox that indicates the debug engine that will be used for the selected process if you click the "Attach" button. If you haven't encountered that term before, read on MSDN about debug engines. Notice that the "Type" column shows the Code Type(s) that can be detected for the process. Typically each debug engine knows how to debug a specific code type (the two terms tend to be used interchangeably). If you click on a different process in the list with a different code type, the debug engine used will be different. However note that this is the automatic behavior. If you believe you know best, or more typically you want to choose the debug engine for a process using more than one code type, you can do so by clicking the "Select..." button, which should yield a "Select Code Type" dialog like this one: In this dialog you can switch to the debug engine you want to use by checking the box in front of your desired one, then hit "OK", then hit "Attach" to use it. Notice that the dialog suggests that you can select more than one. Not all combinations work (you'll get an error if you select two incompatible debug engines), but some do. Also notice in the list of debug engines one of the new players in Visual Studio 11, the GPU debug engine - I will be covering that on the C++ AMP team blog (and no, it cannot be combined with any others in this release). Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Responding to Invites

    - by Daniel Moth
    Following up from my post about Sending Outlook Invites here is a shorter one on how to respond. Whatever your choice (ACCEPT, TENTATIVE, DECLINE), if the sender has not unchecked the "Request Response" option, then send your response. Always send your response. Even if you think the sender made a mistake in keeping it on, send your response. Seriously, not responding is plain rude. If you knew about the meeting, and you are happy investing your time in it, and the time and location work for you, and there is an implicit/explicit agenda, then ACCEPT and send it. If one or more of those things don't work for you then you have a few options. Send a DECLINE explaining why. Reply with email to ask for further details or for a change to be made. If you don’t receive a response to your email, send a DECLINE when you've waited enough. Send a TENTATIVE if you haven't made up your mind yet. Hint: if they really require you there, they'll respond asking "why tentative" and you have a discussion about it. When you deem appropriate, instead of the options above, you can also use the counter propose feature of Outlook but IMO that feature has questionable interaction model and UI (on both sender and recipient) so many people get confused by it. BTW, two of my outlook rules are relevant to invites. The first one auto-marks as read the ACCEPT responses if there is no comment in the body of the accept (I check later who has accepted and who hasn't via the "Tracking" button of the invite). I don’t have a rule for the DECLINE and TENTATIVE cause typically I follow up with folks that send those.   The second rule ensures that all Invites go to a specific folder. That is the first folder I see when I triage email. It is also the only folder which I have configured to show a count of all items inside it, rather than the unread count - when sending a response to an invite the item disappears from the folder and hence it is empty and not nagging me. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Live Debugging

    - by Daniel Moth
    Based on my classification of diagnostics, you should know what live debugging is NOT about - at least according to me :-) and in this post I'll share how I think of live debugging. These are the (outer) steps to live debugging Get the debugger in the picture. Control program execution. Inspect state. Iterate between 2 and 3 as necessary. Stop debugging (and potentially start new iteration going back to step 1). Step 1 has two options: start with the debugger attached, or execute your binary separately and attach the debugger later. You might say there is a 3rd option, where the app notifies you that there is an issue, referred to as JIT debugging. However, that is just a variation of the attach because that is when you start the debugging session: when you attach. I'll be covering in future posts how this step works in Visual Studio. Step 2 is about pausing (or breaking) your app so that it makes no progress and remains "frozen". A sub-variation is to pause only parts of its execution, or in other words to freeze individual threads. I'll be covering in future posts the various ways you can perform this step in Visual Studio. Step 3, is about seeing what the state of your program is when you have paused it. Typically it involves comparing the state you are finding, with a mental picture of what you thought the state would be. Or simply checking invariants about the intended state of the app, with the actual state of the app. I'll be covering in future posts the various ways you can perform this step in Visual Studio. Step 4 is necessary if you need to inspect more state - rinse and repeat. Self-explanatory, and will be covered as part of steps 2 & 3. Step 5 is the most straightforward, with 3 options: Detach the debugger; terminate your binary though the normal way that it terminates (e.g. close the main window); and, terminate the debugging session through your debugger with a result that it terminates the execution of your program too. In a future post I'll cover the ways you can detach or terminate the debugger in Visual Studio. I found an old picture I used to use to map the steps above on Visual Studio 2010. It is basically the Debug menu with colored rectangles around each menu mapping the menu to one of the first 3 steps (step 5 was merged with step 1 for that slide). Here it is in case it helps: Stay tuned for more... Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Attach to Process in Visual Studio

    - by Daniel Moth
    One option for achieving step 1 in the Live Debugging process is attaching to an already running instance of the process that hosts your code, and this is a good place for me to talk about debug engines. You can attach to a process by selecting the "Debug" menu and then the "Attach To Process…" menu in Visual Studio 11 (Ctrl+Alt+P with my keyboard bindings), and you should see something like this screenshot: I am not going to explain this UI, besides being fairly intuitive, there is good documentation on MSDN for the Attach dialog. I do want to focus on the row of controls that starts with the "Attach to:" label and ends with the "Select..." button. Between them is the readonly textbox that indicates the debug engine that will be used for the selected process if you click the "Attach" button. If you haven't encountered that term before, read on MSDN about debug engines. Notice that the "Type" column shows the Code Type(s) that can be detected for the process. Typically each debug engine knows how to debug a specific code type (the two terms tend to be used interchangeably). If you click on a different process in the list with a different code type, the debug engine used will be different. However note that this is the automatic behavior. If you believe you know best, or more typically you want to choose the debug engine for a process using more than one code type, you can do so by clicking the "Select..." button, which should yield a "Select Code Type" dialog like this one: In this dialog you can switch to the debug engine you want to use by checking the box in front of your desired one, then hit "OK", then hit "Attach" to use it. Notice that the dialog suggests that you can select more than one. Not all combinations work (you'll get an error if you select two incompatible debug engines), but some do. Also notice in the list of debug engines one of the new players in Visual Studio 11, the GPU debug engine - I will be covering that on the C++ AMP team blog (and no, it cannot be combined with any others in this release). Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Running C++ AMP kernels on the CPU

    - by Daniel Moth
    One of the FAQs we receive is whether C++ AMP can be used to target the CPU. For targeting multi-core we have a technology we released with VS2010 called PPL, which has had enhancements for VS 11 – that is what you should be using! FYI, it also has a Linux implementation via Intel's TBB which conforms to the same interface. When you choose to use C++ AMP, you choose to take advantage of massively parallel hardware, through accelerators like the GPU. Having said that, you can always use the accelerator class to check if you are running on a system where the is no hardware with a DirectX 11 driver, and decide what alternative code path you wish to follow.  In fact, if you do nothing in code, if the runtime does not find DX11 hardware to run your code on, it will choose the WARP accelerator which will run your code on the CPU, taking advantage of multi-core and SSE2 (depending on the CPU capabilities WARP also uses SSE3 and SSE 4.1 – it does not currently use AVX and on such systems you hopefully have a DX 11 GPU anyway). A few things to know about WARP It is our fallback CPU solution, not intended as a primary target of C++ AMP. WARP stands for Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform and you can read old info on this MSDN page on WARP. What is new in Windows 8 Developer Preview is that WARP now supports DirectCompute, which is what C++ AMP builds on. It is not currently clear if we will have a CPU fallback solution for non-Windows 8 platforms when we ship. When you create a WARP accelerator, its is_emulated property returns true. WARP does not currently support double precision.   BTW, when we refer to WARP, we refer to this accelerator described above. If we use lower case "warp", that refers to a bunch of threads that run concurrently in lock step and share the same instruction. In the VS 11 Developer Preview, the size of warp in our Ref emulator is 4 – Ref is another emulator that runs on the CPU, but it is extremely slow not intended for production, just for debugging. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • OOF checklist

    - by Daniel Moth
    When going on vacation or otherwise being out of office (known as OOF in Microsoft), it is polite and professional that our absence creates the minimum disruption possible to the rest of the business, and especially our colleagues. Below is my OOF checklist - I try to do these as soon as I know I'll be OOF, rather than leave it for the night before. Let the relevant folks on the team know the planned dates of absence and check if anybody was expecting something from you during that timeframe. Reset expectations with them, and as applicable try to find another owner for individual activities that cannot wait. Go through your calendar for the OOF period and decline every meeting occurrence so the owner of the meeting knows that you won't be attending (similar to my post about responding to invites). If it is your meeting cancel it so that people don’t turn up without the meeting organizer being there. Do this even for meetings were the folks should know due to step #1. Over-communicating is a good thing here and keeps calendars all around up to date. Enter your OOF dates in whatever tool your company uses. Typically that is the notification to your manager. In your Outlook calendar, create a local Appointment (don't invite anyone) for the date range (All day event) setting the "Show As" dropdown to "Out of Office". This way, people won’t try to schedule meetings with you on that day. If you use Lync, set the status to "Off Work" for that period. If you won't be responding to email (which when on your vacation you definitely shouldn't) then in Outlook setup "Automatic Replies (Out of Office)" for that period. This way people won’t think you are rude when not replying to their emails. In your OOF message point to an alias (ideally of many people) as a fallback for urgent queries. If you want to proactively notify individuals of your OOFage then schedule and send a multi-day meeting request for the entire period. Remember to set the "Show As" to "Free" (so their calendar doesn’t show busy/oof to others), set the "Reminder" to "None" (so they don’t get a reminder about it), set "Low Importance", and uncheck both "Response Options" so if they don't want this on their calendar, it is just one click for them to get rid of it. Aside: I have another post with advice on sending invites. If you care about people who would not observe the above but could drop by your office, stick a physical OOF note at your office door or chair/monitor or desk. Have I missed any? Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Perfect is the enemy of “Good Enough”

    - by Daniel Moth
    This is one of the quotes that I was against, but now it is totally part of my core beliefs: "Perfect is the enemy of Good Enough" Folks used to share this quote a lot with me in my early career and my frequent interpretation was that they were incompetent people that were satisfied with mediocrity, i.e. I ignored them and their advice. (Yes, I went through an arrogance phase). I later "grew up" and "realized" that they were missing the point, so instead of ignoring them I would retort: "Of course we have to aim for perfection, because as human beings we'll never achieve perfection, so by aiming for perfection we will indeed achieve good enough results". (Yes, I went through a smart ass phase). Later I grew up a bit more and "understood" that what I was really being told is to finish my work earlier and move on to other things because by trying to perfect that one thing, another N things that I was responsible for were suffering by not getting my attention - all things on my plate need to move beyond the line, not just one of them to go way over the line. It is really a statement of increasing scale and scope. To put it in other words, getting PASS grades on 10 things is better than getting an A+ with distinction on 1-2 and a FAIL on the rest. Instead of saying “I am able to do very well these X items” it is best if you can say I can do well enough on these X * Y items”, where Y > 1. That is how breadth impact is achieved. In the future, I may grow up again and have a different interpretation, but for now - even though I secretly try to "perfect" things, I try not to do that at the expense of other responsibilities. This means that I haven't had anybody quote that saying to me in a while (or perhaps my quality of work has dropped so much that it doesn't apply to me any more - who knows :-)). Wikipedia attributes the quote to Voltaire and it also makes connections to the “Law of diminishing returns”, and to the “80-20 rule” or “Pareto principle”… it commonly takes 20% of the full time to complete 80% of a task while to complete the last 20% of a task takes 80% of the effort …check out the Wikipedia entry on “Perfect is the enemy of Good” and its links. Also use your favorite search engine to search and see what others are saying (Bing, Google) – it is worth internalizing this in a way that makes sense to you… Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Link instead of Attaching

    - by Daniel Moth
    With email storage not being an issue in many companies (I think I currently have 25GB of storage on my email account, I don’t even think about storage), this encourages bad behaviors such as liberally attaching office documents to emails instead of sharing a link to the document in SharePoint or SkyDrive or some file share etc. Attaching a file admittedly has its usage scenarios too, but it should not be the default. I thought I'd list the reasons why sharing a link can be better than attaching files directly. In no particular order: Better Review. It allows multiple recipients to review the file and their comments are aggregated into a single document. The alternative is everyone having to detach the document, add their comments, then send back to you, and then you have to collate. Wirth the alternative, you also potentially miss out on recipients reading comments from other recipients. Always up to date. The attachment becomes a fork instead of an always up to date document. For example, you send the email on Thursday, I only open it on Tuesday: between those days you could have made updates that now I am missing because you decided to share a link instead of an attachment. Better bookmarking. When I need to find that document you shared, you are forcing me to search through my email (I may not even be running outlook), instead of opening the link which I have bookmarked in my browser or my collection of links in my OneNote or from the recent/pinned links of the office app on my task bar, etc. Can control access. If someone accidentally or naively forwards your link to someone outside your group/org who you’d prefer not to have access to it, the location of the document can be protected with specific access control. Can add more recipients. If someone adds people to the email thread in outlook, your attachment doesn't get re-attached - instead, the person added is left without the attachment unless someone remembers to re-attach it. If it was a link, they are immediately caught up without further actions. Enable Discovery. If you put it on a share, I may be able to discover other cool stuff that lives alongside that document. Save on storage. So this doesn't apply to me given my opening statement, but if in your company you do have such limitations, attaching files eats up storage on all recipients accounts and will also get "lost" when those people archive email (and lose completely at some point if they follow the company retention policy). Like I said, attachments do have their place, but they should be an explicit choice for explicit reasons rather than the default. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • GPU Debugging with VS 11

    - by Daniel Moth
    With VS 11 Developer Preview we have invested tremendously in parallel debugging for both CPU (managed and native) and GPU debugging. I'll be doing a whole bunch of blog posts on those topics, and in this post I just wanted to get people started with GPU debugging, i.e. with debugging C++ AMP code. First I invite you to watch 6 minutes of a glimpse of the C++ AMP debugging experience though this video (ffw to minute 51:54, up until minute 59:16). Don't read the rest of this post, just go watch that video, ideally download the High Quality WMV. Summary GPU debugging essentially means debugging the lambda that you pass to the parallel_for_each call (plus any functions you call from the lambda, of course). CPU debugging means debugging all the code above and below the parallel_for_each call, i.e. all the code except the restrict(direct3d) lambda and the functions that it calls. With VS 11 you have to choose what debugger you want to use for a particular debugging session, CPU or GPU. So you can place breakpoints all over your code, then choose what debugger you want (CPU or GPU), and you'll only be able to hit breakpoints for the code type that the debugger engine understands – the remaining breakpoints will appear as unbound. If you want to hit the unbound breakpoints, you'd have to stop debugging, and start again with the other debugger. Sorry. We suck. We know. But once you are past that limitation, I think you'll find the experience truly rewarding – seriously! Switching debugger engines With the Developer Preview bits, one way to switch the debugger engine is through the project properties – see the screenshots that follow. This one is showing the CPU option selected, which is basically the default that you are all familiar with: This screenshot is showing the GPU option selected, by changing the debugger launcher (notice that this applies for both the local and remote case): You actually do not have to open the project properties just for switching the debugger engine, you can switch the selection from the toolbar in VS 11 Developer Preview too – see following screenshot (the effect is the same as if you opened the project properties and switched there) Breakpoint behavior Here are two screenshots, one showing a debugging session for CPU and the other a debugging session for GPU (notice the unbound breakpoints in each case) …and here is the GPU case (where we cannot bind the CPU breakpoints but can the GPU breakpoint, which is actually hit) Give C++ AMP debugging a try So to debug your C++ AMP code, pull down the drop down under the 'play' button to select the 'GPU C++ Direct3D Compute Debugger' menu option, then hit F5 (or the 'play' button itself). Then you can explore debugging by exploring the menus under the Debug and under the Debug->Windows menus. One way to do that exploration is through the C++ AMP debugging walkthrough on MSDN. Another way to explore the C++ AMP debugging experience, you can use the moth.cpp code file, which is what I used in my BUILD session debugger demo. Note that for my demo I was using the latest internal VS11 bits, so your experience with the Developer Preview bits won't be identical to what you saw me demonstrate, but it shouldn't be far off. Stay tuned for a lot more content on the parallel debugger in VS 11, both CPU and GPU, both managed and native. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • asynchrony is viral

    - by Daniel Moth
    It is becoming hard to write code today without introducing some form of asynchrony and, if you are using .NET (e.g. for Windows Phone 8 or Windows Store apps), that means sooner or later you have to await something and mark your method as async. My most recent examples included introducing speech recognition in my Translator By Moth phone app where I had to await mySpeechRecognizerUI.RecognizeWithUIAsync() and when moving that code base to a Windows Store project just to show a MessageBox I had to await myMessageDialog.ShowAsync(). Any time you need to invoke an asynchronous method in your code, you have a choice to make: kick off the operation but don’t wait for it to complete (otherwise known as fire-and-forget), synchronously wait for it to complete (which will entail blocking, which can be bad, especially on a UI thread), or asynchronously wait for it to complete before continuing on with the rest of the method’s work. In most cases, you want the latter, and the await keyword makes that trivial to implement.  When you use the magical await keyword in front of an API call, then you typically have to make additional changes to your code: This await usage is within a method of course, and now you have to annotate that method with async. Furthermore, you have to change the return type of the method you just annotated so it returns a Task (if it previously returned void), or Task<myOldReturnType> (if it previously returned myOldReturnType). Note that if it returns void, in some cases you could cheat and stop there. Furthermore, any method that called this method you just annotated with async will now also be invoking an asynchronous operation, so you have to make that change in the body of the caller method to introduce the await keyword before the call to the method. …you guessed it, you now have to change this caller method to be annotated with async and have its return types tweaked... …and it goes on virally… At some point you reach the root of your user code, e.g. a GUI event handler, and whoever calls that void method can already deal with the fact that you marked it as async and the viral introduction of the keywords stops there… This is all wonderful progress and a very powerful mechanism, and I just wish someone had written a refactoring tool to take care of this… anyone? I mentioned earlier that you have a choice when invoking an asynchronous operation. If the first time you encounter this you wish to localize the impact of all these changes and essentially try to turn the asynchronous behavior into synchronous by blocking - don't! For reasons why you don't want to do that, read Toub's excellent blog post (and check out the rest of his blog with gems on async programming starting with the Async FAQ). Just embrace the pattern knowing that when you use one instance of an await, you'll propagate the change all the way to the root user code method, e.g. typically an event handler. Related aside: I just finished re-writing my MessageBox wrapper class for Phone projects, including making it work in Windows Store projects, and it does expect you to use it with an await :-). I'll share that in an upcoming post for those of you that have the same need… Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • concurrency::accelerator_view

    - by Daniel Moth
    Overview We saw previously that accelerator represents a target for our C++ AMP computation or memory allocation and that there is a notion of a default accelerator. We ended that post by introducing how one can obtain accelerator_view objects from an accelerator object through the accelerator class's default_view property and the create_view method. The accelerator_view objects can be thought of as handles to an accelerator. You can also construct an accelerator_view given another accelerator_view (through the copy constructor or the assignment operator overload). Speaking of operator overloading, you can also compare (for equality and inequality) two accelerator_view objects between them to determine if they refer to the same underlying accelerator. We'll see later that when we use concurrency::array objects, the allocation of data takes place on an accelerator at array construction time, so there is a constructor overload that accepts an accelerator_view object. We'll also see later that a new concurrency::parallel_for_each function overload can take an accelerator_view object, so it knows on what target to execute the computation (represented by a lambda that the parallel_for_each also accepts). Beyond normal usage, accelerator_view is a quality of service concept that offers isolation to multiple "consumers" of an accelerator. If in your code you are accessing the accelerator from multiple threads (or, in general, from different parts of your app), then you'll want to create separate accelerator_view objects for each thread. flush, wait, and queuing_mode When you create an accelerator_view via the create_view method of the accelerator, you pass in an option of immediate or deferred, which are the two members of the queuing_mode enum. At any point you can access this value from the queuing_mode property of the accelerator_view. When the queuing_mode value is immediate (which is the default), any commands sent to the device such as kernel invocations and data transfers (e.g. parallel_for_each and copy, as we'll see in future posts), will get submitted as soon as the runtime sees fit (that is the definition of immediate). When the value of queuing_mode is deferred, the commands will be batched up. To send all buffered commands to the device for execution, there is a non-blocking flush method that you can call. If you wish to block until all the commands have been sent, there is a wait method you can call. Deferring is a more advanced scenario aimed at performance gains when you are submitting many device commands and you want to avoid the tiny overhead of flushing/submitting each command separately. Querying information Just like accelerator, accelerator_view exposes the is_debug and version properties. In fact, you can always access the accelerator object from the accelerator property on the accelerator_view class to access the accelerator interface we looked at previously. Interop with D3D (aka DX) In a later post I'll show an example of an app that uses C++ AMP to compute data that is used in pixel shaders. In those scenarios, you can benefit by integrating C++ AMP into your graphics pipeline and one of the building blocks for that is being able to use the same device context from both the compute kernel and the other shaders. You can do that by going from accelerator_view to device context (and vice versa), through part of our interop API in amp.h: *get_device, create_accelerator_view. More on those in a later post. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Visual Studio Exceptions dialogs

    - by Daniel Moth
    Previously I covered step 1 of live debugging with start and attach. Once the debugger is attached, you want to go to step 2 of live debugging, which is to break. One way to break under the debugger is to do nothing, and just wait for an exception to occur in your code. This is true for all types of code that you debug in Visual Studio, and let's consider the following piece of C# code:3: static void Main() 4: { 5: try 6: { 7: int i = 0; 8: int r = 5 / i; 9: } 10: catch (System.DivideByZeroException) {/*gulp. sue me.*/} 11: System.Console.ReadLine(); 12: } If you run this under the debugger do you expect an exception on line 8? It is a trick question: you have to know whether I have configured the debugger to break when exceptions are thrown (first-chance exceptions) or only when they are unhandled. The place you do that is in the Exceptions dialog which is accessible from the Debug->Exceptions menu and on my installation looks like this: Note that I have checked all CLR exceptions. I could have expanded (like shown for the C++ case in my screenshot) and selected specific exceptions. To read more about this dialog, please read the corresponding Exception Handling debugging msdn topic and all its subtopics. So, for the code above, the debugger will break execution due to the thrown exception (exactly as if the try..catch was not there), so I see the following Exception Thrown dialog: Note the following: I can hit continue (or hit break and then later continue) and the program will continue fine since I have a catch handler. If this was an unhandled exception, then that is what the dialog would say (instead of first chance exception) and continuing would crash the app. That hyperlinked text ("Open Exception Settings") opens the Exceptions dialog I described further up. The coolest thing to note is the checkbox - this is new in this latest release of Visual Studio: it is a shortcut to the checkbox in the Exceptions dialog, so you don't have to open it to change this setting for this specific exception - you can toggle that option right from this dialog. Finally, if you try the code above on your system, you may observe a couple of differences from my screenshots. The first is that you may have an additional column of checkboxes in the Exceptions dialog. The second is that the last dialog I shared may look different to you. It all depends on the Debug->Options settings, and the two relevant settings are in this screenshot: The Exception assistant is what configures the look of the UI when the debugger wants to indicate exception to you, and the Just My Code setting controls the extra column in the Exception dialog. You can read more about those options on MSDN: How to break on User-Unhandled exceptions (plus Gregg’s post) and Exception Assistant. Before I leave you to go play with this stuff a bit more, please note that this level of debugging is now available for JavaScript too, and if you are looking at the Exceptions dialog and wondering what the "GPU Memory Access Exceptions" node is about, stay tuned on the C++ AMP blog ;-) Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Give a session on C++ AMP – here is how

    - by Daniel Moth
    Ever since presenting on C++ AMP at the AMD Fusion conference in June, then the Gamefest conference in August, and the BUILD conference in September, I've had numerous requests about my material from folks that want to re-deliver the same session. The C++ AMP session I put together has evolved over the 3 presentations to its final form that I used at BUILD, so that is the one I recommend you base yours on. Please get the slides and the recording from channel9 (I'll refer to slide numbers below). This is how I've been presenting the C++ AMP session: Context (slide 3, 04:18-08:18) Start with a demo, on my dual-GPU machine. I've been using the N-Body sample (for VS 11 Developer Preview). (slide 4) Use an nvidia slide that has additional examples of performance improvements that customers enjoy with heterogeneous computing. (slide 5) Talk a bit about the differences today between CPU and GPU hardware, leading to the fact that these will continue to co-exist and that GPUs are great for data parallel algorithms, but not much else today. One is a jack of all trades and the other is a number cruncher. (slide 6) Use the APU example from amd, as one indication that the hardware space is still in motion, emphasizing that the C++ AMP solution is a data parallel API, not a GPU API. It has a future proof design for hardware we have yet to see. (slide 7) Provide more meta-data, as blogged about when I first introduced C++ AMP. Code (slide 9-11) Introduce C++ AMP coding with a simplistic array-addition algorithm – the slides speak for themselves. (slide 12-13) index<N>, extent<N>, and grid<N>. (Slide 14-16) array<T,N>, array_view<T,N> and comparison between them. (Slide 17) parallel_for_each. (slide 18, 21) restrict. (slide 19-20) actual restrictions of restrict(direct3d) – the slides speak for themselves. (slide 22) bring it altogether with a matrix multiplication example. (slide 23-24) accelerator, and accelerator_view. (slide 26-29) Introduce tiling incl. tiled matrix multiplication [tiling probably deserves a whole session instead of 6 minutes!]. IDE (slide 34,37) Briefly touch on the concurrency visualizer. It supports GPU profiling, but enhancements specific to C++ AMP we hope will come at the Beta timeframe, which is when I'll be spending more time talking about it. (slide 35-36, 51:54-59:16) Demonstrate the GPU debugging experience in VS 11. Summary (slide 39) Re-iterate some of the points of slide 7, and add the point that the C++ AMP spec will be open for other compiler vendors to implement, even on other platforms (in fact, Microsoft is actively working on that). (slide 40) Links to content – see slide – including where all your questions should go: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/parallelcppnative/threads.   "But I don't have time for a full blown session, I only need 2 (or just 1, or 3) C++ AMP slides to use in my session on related topic X" If all you want is a small number of slides, you can take some from the session above and customize them. But because I am so nice, I have created some slides for you, including talking points in the notes section. Download them here. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • What DX level does my graphics card support? Does it go to 11?

    - by Daniel Moth
    Recently I run into a situation that I have run into quite a few times. Someone encounters a machine and the question arises: "Is there a DirectX 11 card in this machine?". Typically the reason you are interested in that is because cards with DirectX 11 drivers fully support DirectCompute (and by extension C++ AMP) for GPGPU programming. The driver specifically is WDDM (1.1 on Windows 7 and Windows 8 introduces WDDM 1.2 with cool new capabilities). There are many ways for figuring out if you have a DirectX11 card, so here are the approaches that you can use, with a bonus right at the end of the post. Run DxDiag WindowsKey + R, type DxDiag and hit Enter. That is the DirectX diagnostic tool, which unfortunately, only tells you on the "System" tab what is the highest version of DirectX installed on your machine. So if it reports DirectX 11, that doesn't mean you have a DX11 driver! The "Display" tab has a promising "DDI version" label, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be accurate on the machines I've tested it with (or I may be misinterpreting its use). Either way, this tool is not the one you want for this purpose, although it is good for telling you the WDDM version among other things. Use the Microsoft hardware page There is a Microsoft Windows 7 compatibility center, that lists all hardware (tip: use the advanced search) and you could try and locate your device there… good luck. Use Wikipedia or the hardware vendor's website Use the Wikipedia page for the vendor cards, for both nvidia and amd. Often this information will also be in the specifications for the cards on the IHV site, but is is nice that wikipedia has a single page per vendor that you can search etc. There is a column in the tables for API support where you can see the DirectX version. Check if it is one of these recommended DX11 cards You may not have a DirectX 11 card and are interested in purchasing one. While I am in no position to make recommendations, I will list here some cards from two big IHVs that we know are DirectX 11 capable. Some AMD (aka ATI) cards Low end, inexpensive DX11 hardware: Radeon 5450, 5550, 6450, 6570 Mid range (decent perf, single precision): Radeon 5750, 5770, 6770, 6790 High end (capable of double precision): Radeon 5850, 5870, 6950, 6970 Single precision APUs: AMD E-Series APUs AMD A-Series APUs Some NVIDIA cards Low end, inexpensive DX11 hardware: GeForce GT430, GT 440, GT520, GTS 450 Quadro 400, 600 Mid-range (decent perf, single precision): GeForce GTX 460, GTX 550 Ti, GTX 560, GTX 560 Ti Quadro 2000 High end (capable of double precision): GeForce GTX 480, GTX 570, GTX 580, GTX 590, GTX 595 Quadro 4000, 5000, 6000 Tesla C2050, C2070, C2075 Get the DirectX SDK and run DirectX Caps Viewer Download and install the June 2010 DirectX SDK. As part of that you now have the DirectX Capabilities Viewer utility (find it in your start menu by searching for "DirectX Caps Viewer", the filename is DXCapsViewer.exe). It will list all your devices (emulated, and real hardware ones) under the first node. Expand the hardware entries and then expand again the Direct3D 11 folder. If you see D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_11_ under that, then your card supports feature level 11 which means it supports DirectCompute and C++ AMP. In the following screenshot of one of my old laptops, the card only goes to feature level 10. Run a utility from the web that just tells you! Of course, writing some C++ AMP code that enumerates accelerators and lists the ones that are capable is trivial. However that requires that you have redistributed the runtime, so a more broadly applicable approach is to use the DX APIs directly to enumerate the DX11 capable cards. That is exactly what the development lead for C++ AMP has done and he describes and shares that utility at this post. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • What DX level does my graphics card support? Does it go to 11?

    - by Daniel Moth
    Recently I run into a situation that I have run into quite a few times. Someone encounters a machine and the question arises: "Is there a DirectX 11 card in this machine?". Typically the reason you are interested in that is because cards with DirectX 11 drivers fully support DirectCompute (and by extension C++ AMP) for GPGPU programming. The driver specifically is WDDM (1.1 on Windows 7 and Windows 8 introduces WDDM 1.2 with cool new capabilities). There are many ways for figuring out if you have a DirectX11 card, so here are the approaches that you can use, with a bonus right at the end of the post. Run DxDiag WindowsKey + R, type DxDiag and hit Enter. That is the DirectX diagnostic tool, which unfortunately, only tells you on the "System" tab what is the highest version of DirectX installed on your machine. So if it reports DirectX 11, that doesn't mean you have a DX11 driver! The "Display" tab has a promising "DDI version" label, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be accurate on the machines I've tested it with (or I may be misinterpreting its use). Either way, this tool is not the one you want for this purpose, although it is good for telling you the WDDM version among other things. Use the Microsoft hardware page There is a Microsoft Windows 7 compatibility center, that lists all hardware (tip: use the advanced search) and you could try and locate your device there… good luck. Use Wikipedia or the hardware vendor's website Use the Wikipedia page for the vendor cards, for both nvidia and amd. Often this information will also be in the specifications for the cards on the IHV site, but is is nice that wikipedia has a single page per vendor that you can search etc. There is a column in the tables for API support where you can see the DirectX version. Check if it is one of these recommended DX11 cards You may not have a DirectX 11 card and are interested in purchasing one. While I am in no position to make recommendations, I will list here some cards from two big IHVs that we know are DirectX 11 capable. Some AMD (aka ATI) cards Low end, inexpensive DX11 hardware: Radeon 5450, 5550, 6450, 6570 Mid range (decent perf, single precision): Radeon 5750, 5770, 6770, 6790 High end (capable of double precision): Radeon 5850, 5870, 6950, 6970 Single precision APUs: AMD E-Series APUs AMD A-Series APUs Some NVIDIA cards Low end, inexpensive DX11 hardware: GeForce GT430, GT 440, GT520, GTS 450 Quadro 400, 600 Mid-range (decent perf, single precision): GeForce GTX 460, GTX 550 Ti, GTX 560, GTX 560 Ti Quadro 2000 High end (capable of double precision): GeForce GTX 480, GTX 570, GTX 580, GTX 590, GTX 595 Quadro 4000, 5000, 6000 Tesla C2050, C2070, C2075 Get the DirectX SDK and run DirectX Caps Viewer Download and install the June 2010 DirectX SDK. As part of that you now have the DirectX Capabilities Viewer utility (find it in your start menu by searching for "DirectX Caps Viewer", the filename is DXCapsViewer.exe). It will list all your devices (emulated, and real hardware ones) under the first node. Expand the hardware entries and then expand again the Direct3D 11 folder. If you see D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_11_ under that, then your card supports feature level 11 which means it supports DirectCompute and C++ AMP. In the following screenshot of one of my old laptops, the card only goes to feature level 10. Run a utility from the web that just tells you! Of course, writing some C++ AMP code that enumerates accelerators and lists the ones that are capable is trivial. However that requires that you have redistributed the runtime, so a more broadly applicable approach is to use the DX APIs directly to enumerate the DX11 capable cards. That is exactly what the development lead for C++ AMP has done and he describes and shares that utility at this post. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

    Read the article

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