.NET Parallel Programming

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

.NET 4 - .NET Parallel Programming

New Feature? :: Delayed cancellation

November 4, 2010 Nov 4, 2010 11/4/10
Danny Shih
 We’re interested in adding support for scheduling cancellation.  For example: // Create a token source that will Cancel() after a delay var cts = new CancellationTokenSource(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(100));// And/or schedule a Cancel() call cts.CancelAfter(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(100));We’ve heard from many folks ...

FAQ :: StartNew() with TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext() doesn’t work?

October 15, 2010 Oct 15, 2010 10/15/10
Danny Shih
We’ve seen a number of folks write the following code to execute on the UI thread and get unexpected behavior. TaskScheduler uiScheduler = TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext();Task uiTask = Task.Factory.StartNew(delegate{    // … Update UI component; BUG!}, uiScheduler);The issue is that the ...

Creating pre-completed Tasks

October 7, 2010 Oct 7, 2010 10/7/10
Danny Shih
 We’ve been considering adding support for creating completed Tasks from an existing result.  Here’s a prototypical example of where this could be valuable. void Task<float> ComputeAsync(...) {     if (!resultIsCached)     {         return Task<...

FAQ :: TaskScheduler.UnobservedTaskException event doesn’t work?

August 5, 2010 Aug 5, 2010 08/5/10
Danny Shih
Recall that if exceptions thrown from Task bodies are left unobserved, they will be escalated.  In .NET 4, this means that TPL will throw them on the finalizer after the Task objects are available for garbage collection.  The UnobservedTaskException event on the TaskScheduler class was added as a last-resort method to observe such ...

Microsoft Biology Foundation 1.0 Released

July 12, 2010 Jul 12, 2010 07/12/10
Stephen Toub - MSFT
It's exciting to see that the Microsoft Biology Foundation 1.0 has been released!  You can read more about it here.  From MBF's Web site:"The Microsoft Biology Foundation (MBF) is a language-neutral bioinformatics toolkit built as an extension to the Microsoft .NET Framework, initially aimed at the area of Genomics research. ...

PLINQ and Office Add-ins

June 30, 2010 Jun 30, 2010 06/30/10
Igor Ostrovsky - MSFT
Many 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: (This paper and many more are available through the Parallel Computing ...

Integrating Parallelism with Windows Workflow Foundation

June 28, 2010 Jun 28, 2010 06/28/10
Igor Ostrovsky - MSFT
Despite 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.Ling Wo and Cristina Manu wrote ...