All about Async/Await, System.Threading.Tasks, System.Collections.Concurrent, System.Linq, and more…
January 15, 2008Jan 15, 200801/15/08Sometimes very simple additions to an API or implementation make me happy. One such nicety in the CTP of PLINQ is the implementation of ToString on the concrete types that represent query operators. These implementations provide a textual representation of the query structure,
December 31, 2007Dec 31, 200712/31/07Joe Duffy, our dev lead, appeared on the 12/25/07 edition of .NET Rocks!, speaking about Parallel Extensions and the Task Parallel Library:
“Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft’s Joe Duffy about the Task Parallel Library, which promises to make multi-threaded programming easier for us all.”
December 19, 2007Dec 19, 200712/19/07Over on his blog, Don Syme has a post about F# and Parallel Extensions:
“Over the coming year I expect we’ll be seeing this library used very widely from F#, and we’ll eventually be using the TPL as a key underlying technology for F# asynchronous workflows.
December 17, 2007Dec 17, 200712/17/07PLINQ is a very cool technology, and I believe it will prove useful for parallelizing operations in a wide range of important scenarios. Moreover, I believe that the programming model it provides will enable a wide-range of developers to easily take advantage of concurrency in their applications.
December 12, 2007Dec 12, 200712/12/07Daniel Moth
is on a roll. Two weeks ago he created three great overview screencasts for Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework. Today, he released a fourth video, covering the Task and TaskManager classes. Thanks, Daniel! We’ll get this added to the MSDN Parallel Computing developer center soon,
December 10, 2007Dec 10, 200712/10/07Introduced in Visual Studio 2005, Code Snippets allow you to quickly insert reusable blocks of code into your project. For example, if you want to quickly write a for loop in C#, you can simply type “for” into your code file, and IntelliSense shows you the “for”
December 7, 2007Dec 7, 200712/7/07Consider a simplified version of Luke Hoban’s LINQ ray tracer
var Xs = Enumerable.Range(1, screenWidth);
var Ys = Enumerable.Range(1, screenHeight);
var sequentialQuery =
from x in Xs
from y in Ys
select new { X = x, Y = y,
December 5, 2007Dec 5, 200712/5/07From time to time, we get a question about whether we intend for Parallel Extensions to target Silverlight. The simple answer is: Not Yet.
Here’s a more complete answer: Not for Silverlight 2.0, at least. Rich Lander from the CLR team described the Silverlight compatibility story very nicely over on his blog.
December 4, 2007Dec 4, 200712/4/07Have you found any bugs, unknown issues (vs. known issues), or any wish list items? Go to our Connect site, sign up for the Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework connection, and start giving us direct feedback.
While the blog comments and forums are a great way to raise concerns,
December 4, 2007Dec 4, 200712/4/07There are some great discussions going on over at the Parallel Extensions forum on MSDN. Download the CTP, try out the bits, head on over to the forums, and get involved! We’d love to hear from you.
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February 2, 2015Feb 2, 201502/2/15There are several nice API-level enhancements to the Task Parallel Library in .NET 4.6, which you can grab a preview of as part of the Visual Studio 2015 CTP.
Task.From*
.NET 4.5 had a Task.FromResult method. This method makes it quick and easy to manufacture a new Task for a known result value,
April 4, 2013Apr 4, 201304/4/13The .NET Framework blog published this morning a guest post from yours truly on .NET Memory Allocation Profiling with Visual Studio 2012. As you’re trying to improve the performance, throughput, and memory usage of code that uses Tasks, the described profiler in Visual Studio can be a valuable tool in your tool belt (of course,
April 3, 2013Apr 3, 201304/3/13A few years back, Wes Dyer wrote a great post on monads, and more recently, Eric Lippert wrote a terrific blog series exploring monads and C#. In that series, Eric alluded to Task<TResult> several times, so I thought I’d share a few related thoughts on Task<TResult>
March 13, 2013Mar 13, 201303/13/13I can be a bit sensitive when it comes to language and how concepts are conveyed. I think it’s important to be accurate, even if not precise, when describing what something is or how to use it, as otherwise the folks to whom you’re communicating can easily form the wrong mental model for that thing.
February 20, 2013Feb 20, 201302/20/13Lucian Wischik and I presented an “async clinic” at the MVP Summit in Bellevue this week. The async/await keywords in C# and Visual Basic drastically simplify asynchronous programming, but that of course doesn’t mean that using them is without any gotchas: the goal of the discussion was to highlight some of the key areas in which we see developers struggling with asynchronous development and to help provide guidance on avoiding and overcoming those roadblocks.
January 28, 2013Jan 28, 201301/28/13These days it’s not uncommon for me to receive an email or read a forum post from someone concerned about a problem they’re experiencing with an async method they’ve written, and they’re seeking help debugging the issue. Sometimes plenty of information about the bug is conveyed,
January 13, 2013Jan 13, 201301/13/13Recently I was writing an app that processed a bunch of files asynchronously. As with the Windows copy file dialog, I wanted to be able to provide the user with a button that would pause the processing operation.
To achieve that,
December 14, 2012Dec 14, 201212/14/12Igor Ostrovsky is one of the minds behind the parallel programming support in the .NET Framework. Igor’s recently written a great set of articles for MSDN Magazine to cover “The C# Memory Model in Theory and Practice“. Part 1 is available now in the December 2012 issue,
November 16, 2012Nov 16, 201211/16/12In both .NET 4 and .NET 4.5, PLINQ supports enumerables with up to Int32.MaxValue elements. Beyond that limit, PLINQ will throw an overflow exception. LINQ to Objects itself has this limitation with certain query operators (such as the indexed Select operator which counts the elements processed),
October 5, 2012Oct 5, 201210/5/12This is a question I hear relatively frequently:
“I have an async operation that’s not cancelable. How do I cancel it?”
The construction of the question often makes me chuckle, but I understand and appreciate what’s really being asked. The developer typically isn’t asking how to cancel the operation itself (if they are asking that,
