Programming Reactive Extensions and LINQ

Pro Reactive Extensions and LINQ is a deep dive into the next important technology for .NET developers: Reactive Extensions. This in-depth tutorial goes beyond what is available anywhere else to teach how to write WPF, Silverlight, and Windows Phone applications using the Reactive Extensions (Rx) to handle events and asynchronous method calls.

Reactive programming allows you to turn those aspects of your code that are currently imperative into something much more event-driven and flexible. For this reason, its sometimes referred to as LINQ for Events.

Reactive programming hinges on the concept of the observable collection, as opposed to the simple enumerable collection with which were all familiar. For example, to extract data from a collection and add it to a list box, you would traditionally iterate through the list box, extracting each object in turn. This approach works fine, but it requires significant knowledge about the data youre working with, which can be limiting. In Rx programming, you're instead informed about each object in turn and then free to react to each notification however you like, which affords much greater flexibility.

This book shows you how reactive programming can be applied to a range of situationsfrom WPF applications to Windows Phone appsto improve coding efficiency and boost performance.

• How to create, debug and manage reactive extensions in many situations
• The observer pattern and how it can be applied to your projects
• How to avoid spaghetti code by using Rx to manage your asynchronous methods
• How to use SelectMany to explore the heart of the Reactive Extensions
• How to come to grips with the reactive user interface framework for building both small and large applications

This book will be most beneficial to existing .NET developers with a grounding in WPF, Silverlight and C#, who want to take their skills further using the powerful reactive programming approach.