All about Async/Await, System.Threading.Tasks, System.Collections.Concurrent, System.Linq, and more…
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,
October 3, 2011Oct 3, 201110/3/11The October 2011 issue of MSDN Magazine is now available online. In it, you can find three articles about the new async/await features of C# and Visual Basic. While the articles can stand alone, they were written with each other in mind in order to provide a 1-2-3 on-ramp into the world of asynchronous programming with these new language and library features.
August 12, 2010Aug 12, 201008/12/10Joe 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.aspx
Nice work, Joe.
July 2, 2010Jul 2, 201007/2/10The .NET Framework 4 introduces a new mechanism for cancellation of operations, based on new types CancellationToken and CancellationTokenSource. This cancellation mechanism is used across the parallel programming libraries: tasks, concurrent collections, and PLINQ queries.
Using Cancellation Support in .NET Framework 4, written by Mike Liddell,
June 30, 2010Jun 30, 201006/30/10Many different kinds of applications can benefit from multi-core parallelism, including add-ins to Microsoft Office.
Donny Amalo wrote a paper, PLINQ and Office Add-ins, where he demonstrates how to implement two parallel Microsoft Office add-ins using PLINQ:
A parallel Monte Carlo simulation add-in for Excel
A parallel custom spell checker add-in for Word
(This paper and many more are available through the Parallel Computing Developer Center on MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/concurrency/ee851578.aspx.)
June 28, 2010Jun 28, 201006/28/10Despite the similarity in naming, the System.Threading.Tasks.Parallel class and the System.Activities.Statements.Parallel* activities in WF4 are largely orthogonal in the scenarios they address. However, WF4 activities and the new parallel programming types in .NET 4 can be used together to great advantage.
June 25, 2010Jun 25, 201006/25/10Boby George and Pooja Nagpal – testers on the Parallel Computing Platform team responsible for the parallel programming support in .NET 4- built a parallel spell checker algorithm and used the Concurrency Visualizer to analyze and improve the performance and scalability of their implementation.
June 21, 2010Jun 21, 201006/21/10In order to execute parallel queries as efficiently as possible, Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) treats ordering as optional. By default, PLINQ considers sequences to be unordered, unless the user explicitly opts into maintaining ordering using either the AsOrdered or the OrderBy operator.
Roy Patrick Tan wrote a detailed article that explains the precise ordering guarantees made by PLINQ for various types of queries: PLINQ’s Ordering Model
(This paper and many more are available through the Parallel Computing Developer Center on MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/concurrency/ee851578.aspx.)
April 26, 2010Apr 26, 201004/26/10.NET 4 introduces new data structures designed to simplify thread-safe access to shared data, and to increase the performance and scalability of multi-threaded applications. To best take advantage of these data structures, it helps to understand their performance characteristics in different scenarios.
April 21, 2010Apr 21, 201004/21/10If you’ve played around with PLINQ and Parallel.ForEach loops in .NET 4, you may have noticed that many PLINQ queries can be rewritten as parallel loops, and also many parallel loops can be rewritten as PLINQ queries. However, both parallel loops and PLINQ have distinct advantages in different situations.
