.NET Parallel Programming

Processing Sequences of Asynchronous Operations with Tasks

November 21, 2010 Nov 21, 2010 11/21/10

Stephen Toub - MSFT

Of late, I’ve seen multiple folks asking about how to use tasks to asynchronously execute a sequence of operations.  For example, given three synchronous functions: public string DoA(string input); public string DoB(string aResult); public string DoC(string bResult); you could invoke these functions with code like...

New Feature? :: Delayed cancellation

November 4, 2010 Nov 4, 2010 11/4/10

Danny Shih

 We’re interested in adding support for scheduling cancellation.  For example: // Create a token source that will Cancel() after a delay var cts = new CancellationTokenSource(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(100));// And/or schedule a Cancel() call cts.CancelAfter(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(100));We’ve heard from many folks ...

TPL Dataflow preview available for download

October 28, 2010 Oct 28, 2010 10/28/10

Stephen Toub - MSFT

As mentioned here, the Visual Studio Async CTP is now available for download from https://msdn.com/vstudio/async.  Not only does this download add language support into C# and Visual Basic for writing asynchronous methods (in which you can easily “await” tasks), it also includes a new .NET library we lovingly refer to as &...

Language support for Tasks!

October 27, 2010 Oct 27, 2010 10/27/10

Stephen Toub - MSFT

Today is a very exciting day for Parallel Extensions, and indeed for all developers using C# and Visual Basic and who are interested in writing more responsive and scalable applications. At the PDC this morning, Anders Hejlsberg just announced the Visual Studio Async CTP, which you can download immediately from the landing page at https://msdn...

New Feature? :: ThreadLocal.Values

October 21, 2010 Oct 21, 2010 10/21/10

Danny Shih

We’ve been considering adding a Values property to System.Threading.ThreadLocal<T>.  Values would return a collection of all current values from all threads (e.g. what you’d get if you evaluated Value from each thread).  This would allow for easy aggregations, and in fact in our Parallel Extensions Extras we have a ...

FAQ :: StartNew() with TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext() doesn’t work?

October 15, 2010 Oct 15, 2010 10/15/10

Danny Shih

We’ve seen a number of folks write the following code to execute on the UI thread and get unexpected behavior. TaskScheduler uiScheduler = TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext();Task uiTask = Task.Factory.StartNew(delegate{    // … Update UI component; BUG!}, uiScheduler);The issue is that the ...

Creating pre-completed Tasks

October 7, 2010 Oct 7, 2010 10/7/10

Danny Shih

 We’ve been considering adding support for creating completed Tasks from an existing result.  Here’s a prototypical example of where this could be valuable. void Task<float> ComputeAsync(...) {     if (!resultIsCached)     {         return Task<...

“C# 4.0 in a Nutshell” parallel programming content

August 12, 2010 Aug 12, 2010 08/12/10

Stephen Toub - MSFT

Joe Albahari, author of "C# 4.0 in a Nutshell", has just published on his Web site the material from his book covering Parallel Extensions.  You can find his extensive article here:https://www.albahari.com/threading/part5.aspxNice work, Joe...

FAQ :: TaskScheduler.UnobservedTaskException event doesn’t work?

August 5, 2010 Aug 5, 2010 08/5/10

Danny Shih

Recall that if exceptions thrown from Task bodies are left unobserved, they will be escalated.  In .NET 4, this means that TPL will throw them on the finalizer after the Task objects are available for garbage collection.  The UnobservedTaskException event on the TaskScheduler class was added as a last-resort method to observe such ...

Microsoft Biology Foundation 1.0 Released

July 12, 2010 Jul 12, 2010 07/12/10

Stephen Toub - MSFT

It's exciting to see that the Microsoft Biology Foundation 1.0 has been released!  You can read more about it here.  From MBF's Web site:"The Microsoft Biology Foundation (MBF) is a language-neutral bioinformatics toolkit built as an extension to the Microsoft .NET Framework, initially aimed at the area of Genomics research. ...