14 DAY TRIAL // In an attempt to ease asynchronous, event-driven "reactive" programming for today’s developers, Microsoft came up with a framework called Reactive Extensions (Rx).
Available for download today as version 1.0.10621 SP1, it brings along a library that can be used for the building of asynchronous and event-based programs. The stable Reactive Extensions 1.0 was pushed out in June this year.
The new software was built on the idea of using observable reactive data sequences and LINQ-style query operators for the designing of new code or maintaining existing one.
“Asynchronous, event-driven "reactive" programming is way too hard in today's world of development tools and frameworks. The huge amount of manual and error-prone plumbing leads to incomprehensible and hard to maintain code,” Microsoft explains.
However, things are getting more complicated each and every day, and Microsoft is aware of that. The industry is moving to services in the cloud, and asynchronous programming is the solution for advancing in this area.
The new Reactive Extensions (Rx) came in to ease programming for developers, enabling them to represent asynchronous data streams with Observables.
Moreover, they can query asynchronous data streams through the use of LINQ operators, and are also offered the possibility to parameterize the concurrency in data streams via Schedulers.
“Centered around the concept of observable data sequences, Reactive Extensions (Rx) provides a framework that takes care of the hard parts of reactive event stream programming,” Microsoft continues.
“Instead of getting lost in the jungle of asynchrony complexity, you now can start dreaming about the endless possibilities of composing queries over asynchronous data sources.”
The new Reactive Extensions (Rx) is fit for both authoring on premises applications and for web apps, since they both involve dealing with asynchronous and event-based programming sometimes.
“Using Rx, you can represent multiple asynchronous data streams (that come from diverse sources, e.g., stock quote, tweets, computer events, web service requests, etc.), and subscribe to the event stream using the IObserver<T> interface,” Microsoft states.
Rx offers support for Windows 7, Windows Phone 7, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP. It can be used for targeting.NET Framework 3.5 SP1,.NET Framework 4, Silverlight 4, Silverlight 5, Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 7.1.
To use it, open the Add Reference dialog in Visual Studio 2008 or later to add references to the System.Reactive assembly. Reference assemblies for Rx are available in the Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Reactive Extensions SDK folder.
Reactive Extensions (Rx) v1.0.10621 SP1 can be downloaded today from Softpedia, via this link.