.NET Parallel Programming

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

.NET 4.5 - .NET Parallel Programming

Task.Run vs Task.Factory.StartNew

October 24, 2011 Oct 24, 2011 10/24/11
Stephen Toub - MSFT
In .NET 4, Task.Factory.StartNew was the primary method for scheduling a new task.  Many overloads provided for a highly configurable mechanism, enabling setting options, passing in arbitrary state, enabling cancellation, and even controlling scheduling behaviors.  The flip side of all of this power is complexity.  You need to ...

New articles on async/await in MSDN Magazine

October 3, 2011 Oct 3, 2011 10/3/11
Stephen Toub - MSFT
The 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 ...

Keeping Async Methods Alive

October 2, 2011 Oct 2, 2011 10/2/11
Stephen Toub - MSFT
Consider a type that will print out a message when it’s finalized, and that has a Dispose method which will suppress finalization: class DisplayOnFinalize : IDisposable {     public void Dispose() { GC.SuppressFinalize(this); }     ~DisplayOnFinalize() { Console.WriteLine(“Finalized”); } } Now ...

Don’t Forget To Complete Your Tasks

October 2, 2011 Oct 2, 2011 10/2/11
Stephen Toub - MSFT
“Don’t forget to complete your tasks.”  That guidance may sound trivial and silly, but I recently saw it as a source of a bug in software written by some very smart folks, and thus thought this would be a good opportunity to remind folks of the imperative.Tasks represent a promise.  If you hand one out, someone else...

Task Exception Handling in .NET 4.5

September 28, 2011 Sep 28, 2011 09/28/11
Stephen Toub - MSFT
For the .NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview, a lot of work has been done to improve the Task Parallel Library (TPL), in terms of functionality, in terms of performance, and in terms of integration with the rest of the .NET Framework.  With all of this work, we’ve strived for a very high compatibility bar, which means your ...

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...

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 ...