Welcome to the new website for the Northwest C++ Users' Group. We have moved the site to a new host and started using Joomla. The old site content can be found here.

Who We Are

The Northwest C++ Users Group (NWCPP) is a group of professional developers and hobbyists living and working in the Pacific Northwest who meet monthly to discuss trends, techniques, and technology regarding the C++ language and industry.  The group meetings and resources are free, and anyone and everyone is welcome to attend.

Past speakers at our meetings include Andrei Alexandrescu, Bruce Eckel, Steve McConnell, Scott Meyers, Jeffrey Richter, Bobby Schmidt, Stan Lippman, Eric Niebler, and Herb Sutter.

Follow @nwcpp on Twitter, join our Facebook group, and join our LinkedIn group.

Seeking or offering a job? Use our LinkedIn Jobs Board.

Next Meeting

Our next meeting will be on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at Building 40/1450 (Steptoe), One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052, at 7pm.

There will be three short talks on Concurrency from Bartosz Milewski, George Reilly, and Max Wilson.

Tasks vs. Sparks, comparing MS Task Parallel Library with Multicore Haskell — Bartosz Milewski

Abstract: Microsoft TPS is a .NET library that allows the programmer to parallelize fragments of code. Haskell support for parallelization goes deeper into the runtime. Of course these are apples and oranges; Haskell is a functional language, TPS is mostly used from C#. But the implementation details are similar (both projects come from Microsoft Research).

Bio: Bartosz Milewski is the president of the NWCPP and has spoken many times.

Read-Mostly Data Structures — George V. Reilly

Abstract: When shared data is read frequently, but seldom modified, the lock can become a bottleneck. Callers are serialized on the lock and the memory underlying the lock sloshes between different processor caches. Since the data is rarely modified, it seems like we should be able to read it without taking a lock at all. This talk presents a safe, lock-free way to access shared data.

Bio: George Reilly has developed software since the 1980s, working in television, graphics, operating systems, editors, advertising, and Web 2.0. He became fascinated with concurrency during the seven years he spent on the Internet Information Services development team at Microsoft, where he concentrated on performance. He now works for Cozi, a small company in Seattle's Pioneer Square, which just won the WTIA's Consumer Product of the Year award for its software that simplifies family life.

Futures in C++ — Max Wilson

Abstract: the new C++0x standard requires support for “futures.” In general, “futures” are a programming language abstraction for data that will be produced asynchronously by other threads. We will discuss the conceptual benefits to programming with futures vs. other synchronization mechanisms, and show which techniques can be used in C++ and how they make concurrent APIs easier to consume.

Bio: Max Wilson is a bit of a language geek, and is a developer on Microsoft’s WCF team. Other than that he is a totally normal guy.