Asynchronous methods, C# iterators, and Tasks

June 30, 2009 Jun 30, 2009 06/30/09

Stephen T

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 ...

Parallel For Loops over Non-Integral Types

June 24, 2009 Jun 24, 2009 06/24/09

Stephen T

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 ...

Mechanisms for Creating Tasks

June 3, 2009 Jun 3, 2009 06/3/09

Stephen T

The core entity in the Task Parallel Library around which everything else revolves is System.Threading.Tasks.Task.  The most common way of creating a Task will be through the StartNew method on the TaskFactory class, a default instance of which is exposed through a static property on Task, e.g. var t = Task.Factory.StartNew(() => { &...

The Nature of TaskCompletionSource

June 2, 2009 Jun 2, 2009 06/2/09

Stephen T

The Task Parallel Library is centered around the Task class and its derived Task<TResult>. The main purpose of these types is to represent the execution of an asynchronous workload and to provide an object with a means to operate on that workload, whether it be to wait for it, to continue from it, or the like. The primary type of ...