In a previous post, it was demonstrated how for loops with very small loop bodies could be parallelized by creating an iterator over ranges, and then using Parallel.ForEach over those ranges. A similar technique can be used to write parallel loops over iteration spaces of non-integers. For example, let’s say I wanted to paralleliz...
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 cooperativ...
As has been discussed previously, one of the new features in the Task Parallel Library is TaskCompletionSource<TResult>, which enables the creation of a Task<TResult> that represents any other asynchronous operation. There are a wide variety of sources in the .NET Framework for asynchronous work. One comes from components th...
As Ed Essey explained in Partitioning in PLINQ, partitioning is an important step in PLINQ execution. Partitioning splits up a single input sequence into multiple sequences that can be processed in parallel. This post further explains chunk partitioning, the most general partitioning scheme that works on any IEnumerable<T>.Chunk partitioning ...
The Asynchronous Programming Model (APM) in the .NET Framework has been around since .NET 1.0 and is the most common pattern for asynchrony in the Framework. Even if you’re not familiar with the name, you’re likely familiar with the core of the pattern. For a given synchronous operation Xyz, the asynchronous version manifest...
The Parallel class represents a significant advancement in parallelizing managed loops. For many common scenarios, it just works, resulting in terrific speedups. However, while ideally Parallel.For could be all things to all people, such things rarely work out, and we’ve had to prioritize certain scenarios over others.One area Par...
The core entity in the Task Parallel Library around which everything else revolves is System.Threading.Tasks.Task. The most common way of creating a Task will be through the StartNew method on the TaskFactory class, a default instance of which is exposed through a static property on Task, e.g. var t = Task.Factory.StartNew(() => { &n...
The Task Parallel Library is centered around the Task class and its derived Task<TResult>. The main purpose of these types is to represent the execution of an asynchronous workload and to provide an object with a means to operate on that workload, whether it be to wait for it, to continue from it, or the like. The primary type of asynchronous...
Prior to the .NET Framework 2.0, unhandled exceptions were largely ignored by the runtime. For example, if a work item queued to the ThreadPool threw an exception that went unhandled by that work item, the ThreadPool would eat that exception and continue on its merry way. Similarly, if a finalizer running on the finalizer thread threw a...
We exert a good deal of effort ensuring that the APIs we provide are consistent within Parallel Extensions as well as with the rest of the .NET Framework. This is from many angles, including behavior and general design, but also naming. So when there are slight differences in naming, it raises questions.One occurrence of such a slight n...
