June 2010 | Parallel Programming with .NET

PLINQ and Office Add-ins

Igor Ostrovsky - MSFTJune 30, 2010Jun 30, 201006/30/10

Many different kinds of applications can benefit from multi-core parallelism, including add-ins to Microsoft Office.
Donny Amalo wrote a paper, PLINQ and Office Add-ins, where he demonstrates how to implement two parallel Microsoft Office add-ins using PLINQ:

A parallel Monte Carlo simulation add-in for Excel
A parallel custom spell checker add-in for Word

(This paper and many more are available through the Parallel Computing Developer Center on MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/concurrency/ee851578.aspx.)

Integrating Parallelism with Windows Workflow Foundation

Igor Ostrovsky - MSFTJune 28, 2010Jun 28, 201006/28/10

Despite the similarity in naming, the System.Threading.Tasks.Parallel class and the System.Activities.Statements.Parallel* activities in WF4 are largely orthogonal in the scenarios they address. However, WF4 activities and the new parallel programming types in .NET 4 can be used together to great advantage.

Concurrency Visualizer: A Case Study

Igor Ostrovsky - MSFTJune 25, 2010Jun 25, 201006/25/10

Boby George and Pooja Nagpal – testers on the Parallel Computing Platform team responsible for the parallel programming support in .NET 4- built a parallel spell checker algorithm and used the Concurrency Visualizer to analyze and improve the performance and scalability of their implementation.

PLINQ’s Ordering Model

Igor Ostrovsky - MSFTJune 21, 2010Jun 21, 201006/21/10

In order to execute parallel queries as efficiently as possible, Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) treats ordering as optional. By default, PLINQ considers sequences to be unordered, unless the user explicitly opts into maintaining ordering using either the AsOrdered or the OrderBy operator.
Roy Patrick Tan wrote a detailed article that explains the precise ordering guarantees made by PLINQ for various types of queries: PLINQ’s Ordering Model
(This paper and many more are available through the Parallel Computing Developer Center on MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/concurrency/ee851578.aspx.)

“Task.Factory.StartNew” vs “new Task(…).Start”

Stephen Toub - MSFTJune 13, 2010Jun 13, 201006/13/10

With TPL, there are several ways to create and start a new task. One way is to use the constructor for task followed by a call to the Start method, e.g. new Task(…).Start();and the other is by using the StartNew method of TaskFactory,

Upcoming NYC user group presentation on Parallel Programming

Stephen Toub - MSFTJune 13, 2010Jun 13, 201006/13/10

I’m going to be in Manhattan on June 29th, and while there I’ll be presenting to a joint meeting of the NYC .NET Developer’s Group and the New York ALT.NET Group on parallel programming with .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010.

Parallel Computing at TechEd North America 2010

Stephen Toub - MSFTJune 6, 2010Jun 6, 201006/6/10

Are you attending TechEd in New Orleans this week? If so, check out the multitude of parallel computing-related breakout sessions, including:

DEV314 | Manycore and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
DEV317 | Profiling and Debugging Parallel Code with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
DEV408 | Task Parallel Library: Design Principles and Best Practices
ARC205 | Patterns of Parallel Programming
WSV325 | Technical Computing from Domain Analysis to Performance Profiling

The first two (DEV314 and DEV317) are being presented by Huseyin Yildiz,

Parallel Programming with .NET