All about Async/Await, System.Threading.Tasks, System.Collections.Concurrent, System.Linq, and more…
November 11, 2011Nov 11, 201111/11/11[Updated 5/17/2012 for Visual Studio 11 Beta]
In a previous article, How to use C++ AMP to C#, we described how you can use P/Invoke to call into C++ AMP and accelerate your C# apps on GPUs and other heterogeneous hardware.
November 10, 2011Nov 10, 201111/10/11Available since .NET 4, ThreadLocal<T> is a container that holds a separate value for every thread. In practice, ThreadLocal<T> is often convenient for storing per-thread counters, resources, or partial results.
As mentioned earlier on this blog, we have been thinking about adding a Values property to enumerate over the values from all threads that ever stored a value into the ThreadLocal<T>
November 10, 2011Nov 10, 201111/10/11One interesting thing to know about PLINQ is that not all queries are guaranteed to execute in parallel (See PLINQ Queries That Run Sequentially for reference). You can think of the AsParallel method as a hint to run in parallel for query shapes that it believes will be faster.
November 10, 2011Nov 10, 201111/10/11We invested a lot of time into making parallel programming “just faster” for .NET 4.5. You’ve already seen some neat tricks to ConcurrentDictionary. There’s a lot more to say about improving the performance of the Task Parallel Library, and Joe Hoag has a written an excellent paper on the subject:
TPL Performance Improvements in .NET 4.5
The paper examines some of the changes made to TPL in .NET 4.5,
November 10, 2011Nov 10, 201111/10/11Imagine that you have a Task handed to you by a third party, and that you would like to force this Task to complete within a specified time period. However, you cannot alter the “natural” completion path and completion state of the Task,
November 9, 2011Nov 9, 201111/9/11A “dataflow block” is represented by a class implementing the IDataflowBlock interface. The state of a dataflow block is represented by the state of its IDataflowBlock.Completion Task, which itself has a Status property. When a dataflow block is in active state,
November 8, 2011Nov 8, 201111/8/11ConcurrentDictionary is a popular concurrent data structure that was introduced in .NET 4. In the .NET 4.5 release, ConcurrentDictionary gets two performance improvements.
One optimization is related to the way ConcurrentDictionary avoids torn reads and writes. To explain the background, all reference types and some value types are guaranteed to be read and written atomically by the Common Language Runtime,
November 1, 2011Nov 1, 201111/1/11In April, we released the Async CTP Refresh, and since then we’ve seen fantastic adoption of the technology. We’ve also seen the technology landscape evolve. Windows Phone 7.5, aka “Mango”, was released. Silverlight 5 has had both a Beta and an RC release.
