.NET Parallel Programming

All about Async/Await, System.Threading.Tasks, System.Collections.Concurrent, System.Linq, and more…

ParallelWhileNotEmpty

August 7, 2008 Aug 7, 2008 08/7/08
Stephen Toub - MSFT
Parallel Extensions includes the System.Threading.Parallel class, which provides several high-level loop replacement constructs like For and ForEach. In previous blog posts, we've taken a look at implementing other loops, such as for loops with arbitrary initialization, conditional, and update logic, range-based loops, and a parallel while.&...

Feedback requested: TaskManager shutdown, Fair scheduling

August 1, 2008 Aug 1, 2008 08/1/08
Stephen Toub - MSFT
One of the primary reasons we've released CTPs of Parallel Extensions is to solicit feedback on the design and functionality it provides.  Does it provide all of the APIs you need to get your job done?  Are there scenarios you wished the APIs supported and that you need to work around in klunky ways?  And so forth.  We've ...

Custom Loop with Arbitrary Initialization, Condition, and Update

July 27, 2008 Jul 27, 2008 07/27/08
Stephen Toub - MSFT
The Parallel.For loop construct provided by Parallel Extensions is focused on providing a parallel alternative to the common sequential pattern of a for loop that iterates over a range of numbers.  However, the for loop construct in a language like C# is not limited just to numbers and iterating over ranges.  It supports arbitrary ...

Useful Abstractions Enabled with ContinueWith

July 24, 2008 Jul 24, 2008 07/24/08
Stephen Toub - MSFT
In the June 2008 CTP of Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework, we introduced the ContinueWith method on both Task and Future<T>.  ContinueWith is, in effect, a callback, very much like events in .NET.  With events, a causal action results in the event being raised, which by default triggers all of the delegates registered ...

Fork/Join parallelism with .NET CountdownEvent

June 21, 2008 Jun 21, 2008 06/21/08
cristina manu
A common asynchronous pattern in code today is the pattern known as fork/join parallelism. This typically manifests by starting n pieces of work and later joining with that work. The existing set of the .NET synchronization primitives does not offer a simple solution for handling this common scenario. It can be achieved, for example, by using...

Introducing ConcurrentStack

June 18, 2008 Jun 18, 2008 06/18/08
cristina manu
A common problem users run into when writing parallel applications is the lack of the thread-safety support in the .NET collection classes. Users typically need to implement their own synchronization mechanism for achieving the goal of safely reading/writing data to the same shared collection. A largely deprecated solution was to use the ...

PLINQ Ordering

June 11, 2008 Jun 11, 2008 06/11/08
essey
There is a natural tension between ordering and performance in a parallel partitioning system such as PLINQ, which we addressed as guidance in the Dec07 CTP documentation:  “Although you can opt into ordering, this does come at a cost to performance because it constrains the options which PLINQ can use for executing a query, so it ...