.NET Parallel Programming

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

.NET 4 - .NET Parallel Programming

Updated Async CTP

November 1, 2011 Nov 1, 2011 11/1/11
Stephen Toub - MSFT
In April, we released the Async CTP Refresh, and since then we've seen fantastic adoption of the technology.  We've also seen the technology landscape evolve.  Windows Phone 7.5, aka "Mango", was released.  Silverlight 5 has had both a Beta and an RC release.  And there have been multiple patches to Visual Studio and the ....

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

TPL Dataflow CTP Refresh

April 13, 2011 Apr 13, 2011 04/13/11
Stephen Toub - MSFT
Today, we released a new CTP of TPL Dataflow, otherwise known as System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow.dll.  You can download this as part of the Microsoft Visual Studio Async CTP, which will also install the new C#/Visual Basic support for writing asynchronous methods, or you can install the DLL itself through the installer available on the ...

Little-known gems: Atomic conditional removals from ConcurrentDictionary

April 2, 2011 Apr 2, 2011 04/2/11
Stephen Toub - MSFT
ConcurrentDictionary<TKey,TValue>, first introduced in .NET 4, is an efficient dictionary data structure that enables thread-safe reading and writing, meaning that multiple threads may all be accessing the dictionary at the same time without corrupting it.  It supports adding through its TryAdd method, conditional updates through ...