.NET Parallel Programming

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

Cancellation in Parallel Extensions

One of the great features that crosses all of Parallel Extensions types is a consistent approach to cancellation (see https://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam/archive/2009/05/22/9635790.aspx). In this post we explore some of the ways cancellation is used in Parallel Extensions and explain the guidance we developed. The new cancellation system is a ...

.NET 4 Cancellation Framework

A very interesting addition to .NET 4 is a set of new types that specifically assist with building cancellation-aware applications and libraries. The new types enable rich scenarios for convenient and safe cancellation, and help simplify situations that used to be be difficult and error-prone and non-composable. The details of the new types ...

Samples for Parallel Programming with the .NET Framework 4

Along with the release of the .NET Framework 4 Beta 1, we've just published a slew of samples that demonstrate using Parallel Extensions in a variety of ways.  You can download these from Code Gallery at https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ParExtSamples.These samples include raytracers, a sudoku game, an image colorization algorithm, solvers ...

Concurrent, Multi-core Programming on Windows and .NET

Thanks to everyone who attended our PDC pre-conference session yesterday on parallelism and concurrency!  We had a wonderful turnout at the event, and David, Joe, and I all had a terrific time. Attached to this post are the slides we presented. (It turns out that the PDC site does allow you to submit an evaluation for a precon.  If ...

Feedback requested: Enumerating Concurrent Collections

The June 2008 CTP of Parallel Extensions contained a first look at some of the work we're doing to augment the .NET Framework with a set of additional coordination data structures that aid in the development of highly concurrent applications.  This included two thread-safe collections, ConcurrentQueue<T> and ConcurrentStack<T>...

Useful Abstractions Enabled with ContinueWith

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 ...