In 2007, Microsoft released the fi rst Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Parallel Extensions for the .NET Framework. The old .NET Framework multithreading programming model was too complex and heavyweight for the forthcoming multicore and manycore CPUs. I had been researching parallel programming, multiprocessor, and multicore since 1997, so I couldn’t help installing the fi rst CTP and trying it. It was obvious that it was going to be an exciting new way of expressing parallelism in future C# versions.
Visual Studio 2010 ships with version 4 of the .NET Framework, the fi rst release to include Parallel Extensions. C# 4 and .NET Framework 4 allow you to shift to a modern task-based programming model to express parallelism. It is easier to write code that takes advantage of multicore microprocessors. Now, you can write code that scales as the number of available cores increases, without having to work with complex managed threads. You are able to write code that runs tasks, and the Common Language Runtime (CLR) will inject the necessary threads for you. It is easy to run data parallelism algorithms taking advantage of multicore.
At the time of this writing, multicore microprocessors are everywhere. Servers, desktop computers, laptops and notebooks, netbooks, mobile Internet devices (MIDs), tablets, and even smartphones use multicore microprocessors. The average number of cores in each microprocessor is going to increase in the forthcoming years. Are you going to lose the opportunity to transform this multicore power into application performance?
Parallel programming must become part of your skill set to effectively develop applications for modern hardware in C#. I spent more than three years working with the diverse versions of Parallel Extensions until Visual Studio 2010 was offi cially released. I enjoyed developing parallelized applications with C#, and I did my best to include explanations for the most common scenarios in this book. Visual Studio 2010 provides an IDE prepared for a parallel developer, and C# is an excellent fi t for the new task-based programming model.
