In this product cycle release, our goal was to focus on providing comprehensive expressions for parallel patterns in C++. This Beta release allows you to start taking advantage of the libraries and go-live with your products using these features. In Visual Studio 2010, we saw the introduction of...

I am super-excited to have been part of multiple announcements that Microsoft made at the AMD Fusion 11 conference held in Bellevue WA this week. First, Herb Sutter announced C++ AMP yesterday morning and AMD Fusion11, which will be an extension of C++ that we are planning to include in our next VC...

I want to invite you to check out a developer sample that I wrote called Bing Maps Trip Optimizer . Bing Maps Trip Optimizer is a C++ ActiveX control that uses the ant colony optimization algorithm to solve the traveling salesman problem . It is driven by an HTML/JavaScript front-end that collects locations...

Welcome back! Last time, we looked at how to use the auto keyword in Visual C++ 2010 to implicitly declare local variables based on their initialization (see The Concurrency Runtime and Visual C++ 2010: Automatic Type Deduction ). This week we’ll look at yet another great Visual C++ 2010 language...

Last time, we looked at how to use lambda expressions in Visual C++ 2010 to make the Concurrency Runtime even easier to use (see The Concurrency Runtime and Visual C++ 2010: Lambda Expressions ). This week we’ll take a quick look at the auto keyword, which is another language feature that can enhance...

As a C++ programmer, you might have already started working with the Concurrency Runtime components in Visual Studio 2010 such as the Parallel Patterns Library (PPL) and the Asynchronous Agents Library . These libraries make it much easier to write parallel code that takes advantage of multi-core. I...

This topic shows how to implement a cartoon-like filter that can be applied to video frames by using a data-flow network. The filter consists of two stages: 1. Color simplification: where a Gaussian average of the neighbor area of a pixel is calculated and assigned to that pixel. This is an iterative...

In my last blog post , I covered an introduction to writing a custom message block. This covered the basic functions required to work with other message blocks in a message-passing network. To be fully compliant with all message blocks, there are four more functions that must be defined to support reserving...

The Asynchronous Agents Library within the Concurrency Runtime provides a set of basic message blocks which can be used to create a message passing network. In most cases, these blocks have sufficient enough flexibility and can be composed together to provide all the necessary functionality for your...

We’ve posted an update to our sample pack at http://code.msdn.com/concrtextras for Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 . The newest thing is this drop of the sample pack are the three new header files in the ConcRTExtras folder.  Here’s what these files contain: ppl_extras.h contains additional stl style parallel...

Last week Visual Studio 2010 Beta was released for download . Since Beta1, the team has been pretty busy adding enhanced functionality to make you more productive at expressing parallelism in your applications and improving the quality and performance of our runtime and programming models. Here’s a guide...

In my previous post I talked about the agent class. Now I will introduce the Agents Library’s message blocks , how to use them, and the fundamentals of what they do. I will cover some basics that apply to all of the message blocks, introduce the messaging APIs, and then specifically explain three blocks...

In my previous posts, I addressed the motivation behind using concurrency runtime’s synchronization primitives and also introduced Critical Section and reader writer lock. In this blog, I will cover concurrency runtime’s event. Event This is a bi-state type class which, unlike Critical Section...

One of the native concurrency components coming in Visual Studio 2010 is the Asynchronous Agents Library. The goal of the Agents Library is to improve developer productively and enable developers to take advantage of concurrency with an agent-based message passing model to build isolated and composable...

Following the release of Visual Studio 2010, we've just published a set of sample applications for using the Parallel Pattern Library, the Agents Library and the Concurrency Runtime on code gallery. These supplement the documentation and samples provided on msdn for Beta1. The samples include using...

One of our architects, Niklas Gustafsson has just posted an actor based auction simulation written in the Asynchronous Agents Library. If you follow the blog trail back, you'll see that this was implemented originally in scala and that Matthew Podwysocki has implemented this in F# . Niklas also alluded...

The latest issue of msdn magazine includes an article that I wrote which illustrates implementing the Dining Philosophers purely in message passing and without using any explicit locking. If you have Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 installed, you can also download the code and build the project , even if you...

Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 has been released, and it is a full install version . The team has been busy, busy busy since the CTP release last fall to deliver most of the APIs and objects we’ve blogged about here into Beta1. So I wanted to take a moment to summarize what’s new in the Beta for the Parallel...

In my previous post, I addressed the motivation behind using concurrency runtime’s synchronization primitives and also introduced Critical Section. In this blog, I will cover concurrency runtime’s reader writer lock. Reader Writer Lock This class enables multiple threads to read from a shared resource...

In a concurrent world multiple entities work together to achieve a common goal. A common way to interact and coordinate is to use shared data. However, shared data must be accessed carefully. This can be achieved through synchronization, primarily using: i) Blocking methods such as locks and mutexes...

Last week, Don McCrady, Damien Watkins from the C++ team and I sat down with Charles from Channel9 and chatted about the Concurrency Runtime, new C++ work in Visual Studio 2010 and how our teams are working together. As Charles pointed out, we also touched briefly upon new features in the C++0x...

In this blog I will be giving an introduction to the native concurrency support in Visual Studio 2010. My motivation is that an architectural understanding of the features will enable the reader to make the most of the underlying infrastructure. In future blogs, I will go deeper into each sub topic....

Last week, we blogged about the Visual Studio 2010 CTP which includes the Concurrency Runtime, the Parallel Pattern Library and the Asynchronous Agents Library which is available as a Virtual PC image. As the Parallel Extensions to .NET team blogged yesterday, this is unfortunate because VPC images only...

In his blog post on Monday, Soma mentioned some of the great things happening at PDC 2008 and also announced the Visual Studio 2010 CTP. We’re very excited to announce that this CTP includes the Concurrency Runtime, the Parallel Pattern and Asynchronous Agents Libraries for C++ developers that we’ve...

A few weeks ago several of us from the Parallel Computing Platform sat down with Charles Torre from Channel 9 to discuss the Concurrency Runtime that we've blogged about here. We talk about the motivation of the Concurrency Runtime, how its scheduler and resource manager interact and discuss the C++...