Paul Betts

Paul Betts

@xpaulbettsx

I'm a software engineer working in Office Labs at Microsoft, creating and testing new ideas for the future of Office, who recently graduated from The Ohio State University. In my spare time, I hack on some open-source software, play guitar and bass, and in general am within e of really awesome.

Functional Async UI Programming using Reactive Extensions and ReactiveUI

For many modern UI applications, managing multiple asynchronous calls whether they be web service calls or calculations in the background, is now a de-facto requirement; however, our tools and frameworks for doing so, Events, are quite primitive and make even simple compositions into complex state management. The Reactive Extensions for .NET greatly simplifies this task, by allowing you to compose event streams in a declarative fashion. On top of Rx, I've built a MVVM framework called ReactiveUI, that allows you to elegantly combine changing Model or ViewModel properties into composite properties to build testable UIs with less effort, even simulating a series of events instantly in a unit test runner using the virtual time scheduler features of Rx.