.NET Parallel Programming

Updated TPL Dataflow CTP

September 27, 2011 Sep 27, 2011 09/27/11

Stephen Toub - MSFT

It’s been a few months since April when we last released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow.dll, aka “TPL Dataflow”.  Today for your programming pleasure, we have another update.As mentioned in “What’s New for Parallelism in .NET 4.5”, System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow...

How to use C++ AMP from C#

September 20, 2011 Sep 20, 2011 09/20/11

Igor Ostrovsky - MSFT

[Updated 5/17/2012 for Visual Studio 11 Beta] In Visual Studio 11 Beta, C++ AMP enables you to accelerate your applications using heterogeneous hardware such as GPUs. If you are a .NET developer, you can still use C++ AMP in your applications. You’ll write most of your code in C#, the pieces to execute on the GPU in C++ AMP, and then ...

Parallelism BUILD talks available on Channel9

September 18, 2011 Sep 18, 2011 09/18/11

Stephen Toub - MSFT

Thanks to everyone who attended my two talks at BUILD this past week, and I hope you enjoyed the sessions!  For those of you unable to attend in person, the recordings of the talks are now available on Channel9: There were hundreds of other sessions this week at BUILD, and you can find their videos here: https://channel9.msdn.com/...

What’s New For Parallelism in .NET 4.5

September 17, 2011 Sep 17, 2011 09/17/11

Stephen Toub - MSFT

.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 saw the introduction of a wide range of new support for parallelism: the Task Parallel Library (TPL), Parallel LINQ (PLINQ), new synchronization and coordination primitives and collections (e.g. ConcurrentDictionary), an improved ThreadPool for handling parallel workloads, new debugger windows, new concurrency ...

Tasks are in Silverlight

September 1, 2011 Sep 1, 2011 09/1/11

Danny Shih

So many of you have asked about it, and it's finally here.  You can now download the RC SDK and Developer Runtime of Silverlight 5, which includes TPL Tasks! https://10rem.net/blog/2011/09/01/silverlight-5-rc-now-available http://www.silverlight.net/downloads (image...

Quick microbenchmarks in Visual Studio with Code Snippets

June 29, 2011 Jun 29, 2011 06/29/11

Stephen Toub - MSFT

Parallelism is all about performance.  After all, in the majority of cases, introducing parallelism into code adds some level of complexity, and the primary reason we’re ok with that additional complexity is because we get great performance enhancements as a result.  As such, as we develop our parallel runtimes and libraries to...

Using Tasks to implement the APM Pattern

June 27, 2011 Jun 27, 2011 06/27/11

Stephen Toub - MSFT

Several times recently, folks have asked how to use tasks to implement the APM pattern, otherwise known as the Asynchronous Programming Model pattern, or the IAsyncResult pattern, or the Begin/End pattern.  While moving forward we encourage folks to use a Task-based pattern for exposing asynchronous operation, the APM pattern has been the...

Parallel Merge Sort using Barrier

June 6, 2011 Jun 6, 2011 06/6/11

Emad Omara

Sorting is one of the most fundamental problems in software algorithms; there are many sequential sorting algorithms with different time and memory complexities, but when it comes to parallel sort, things get more complicated. I will explain a simple and scalable algorithm to write a parallel sort using the .NET 4.0 System.Threading.Barrier ...

More case studies on .NET 4 parallelism support

May 3, 2011 May 3, 2011 05/3/11

Stephen Toub - MSFT

When .NET 4 was launched, we blogged about several case studies published regarding usage of .NET 4 to parallelize applications.  Quite recently, several additional case studies have been published.  I love reading these in order to better understand how folks are applying this technology, and parallelism in general, to improve their...

Static constructor deadlocks

May 3, 2011 May 3, 2011 05/3/11

Igor Ostrovsky - MSFT

One important fact to know about static constructors is that they effectively execute under a lock. The CLR must ensure that each type is initialized exactly once, and so it uses locking to prevent multiple threads from executing the same static constructor. A caveat, however, is that executing the static constructor under ...