If you don’t follow the blog from the Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft, then you probably should! But if you aren’t, then you didn’t see this post which was made on Friday. Joshua Phillips put up a post letting the world know that they have finally released bits for Axum, which was formally named Maestro.

In case you are not familiar with the project, it is described by Joshua as:

Axum is an incubation .NET language that aims to make programming parallelism safe by focusing on isolation of state. It balances the efficiency of shared state and the safety of message-passing in one programming model. The focus on isolation and message-passing also allows an Axum application to be distributed across processes and machines without redesign or any significant coding effort.

In other words, it is a DSL for concurrency that uses an actor/message based model similar to Erlang. It is implemented using the CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime) which is part of Microsoft robotics. Here is a good channel 9 video on it so you can get a better idea of what it is all about.

I am pretty excited about this, and I can’t wait to see where the team goes with this. Hopefully it will end up as a product that I can use in the future!