The .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 is now available! MSDN Subscribers can download it today, and it will be generally available for download on Wednesday. More information is available at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd582936.aspx. Additionally, one of the really exciting things about this Beta release is that it’s “go-...
In a week, I’m going to be traveling through Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, speaking about parallel computing, Visual Studio 2010, and .NET 4, primarily at corporations during the day and at user groups in the evenings.If you’re in the area and interested, please do attend, and I look forward to meeting you! A list of ev...
“What does Task.Wait do?” Simple question, right? At a high-level, yes, the method achieves what its name implies, preventing the current thread from making forward progress past the call to Wait until the target Task has completed, one way or another. If the Task ran to completion, Wait will return successfully. If th...
Common operations like map and filter are available in parallelized form through PLINQ, though the names differ. A map can be achieved with PLINQ’s Select operator, and a filter with PLINQ’s Where operator.For example, I could implement a ParallelMap operation that takes in one array and returns another as follows: public static...
The Task abstractions in .NET 4 run on instances of the TaskScheduler class. Two implementations of TaskScheduler ship as part of the .NET Framework 4. The first is the default scheduler, which is integrated with the .NET 4 ThreadPool and takes advantage of its work-stealing queues. The second is the type of TaskScheduler returned...
The Parallel class in .NET 4 includes methods that implement three parallel constructs: parallelized for loops (Parallel.For), parallelized foreach loops (Parallel.ForEach), and parallelized statement regions (Parallel.Invoke). One of the interesting things about Parallel.Invoke is that, in some cases and at least in the current implementatio...
One of the ways in which the Task Parallel Library achieves good performance is through “work-stealing”. Work-stealing is supported in the .NET 4 ThreadPool for access through the Task Parallel Library and its default scheduler. This manifests as every thread in the ThreadPool having its own queue for work; when that thread ...
More and more, developers are realizing the significant scalability advantages that asynchronous programming can provide, especially as it relates to I/O. Consider an application that needs to copy data from one stream to another stream, such as is being done in the following synchronous implementation: static void CopyStreamToStream(Stream input...
In a previous post, it was demonstrated how for loops with very small loop bodies could be parallelized by creating an iterator over ranges, and then using Parallel.ForEach over those ranges. A similar technique can be used to write parallel loops over iteration spaces of non-integers. For example, let’s say I wanted to paralleliz...
One of the great features that crosses all of Parallel Extensions types is a consistent approach to cancellation (see https://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam/archive/2009/05/22/9635790.aspx). In this post we explore some of the ways cancellation is used in Parallel Extensions and explain the guidance we developed. The new cancellation system is a cooperativ...
