There is no escaping from concurrency challenges... or is there? (A slightly modified version of this article was published in the August 2008 edition of the MSDN Flash newsletter ) Dual, quad, and eight-core processors are becoming the norm. Is your application capable of utilising all available...

This is an article in a series of blog entries describing a set of new Coordination Data Structures (CDS) introduced in the June 2008 CTP of the Parallel Extensions for .NET Framework . In C#, when a field declaration includes a readonly modifier, assignments to the fields introduced by the declaration...

This is an article in a series of blog entries describing a set of new Coordination Data Structures (CDS) introduced in the June 2008 CTP of the Parallel Extensions for .NET Framework . Waiting on locks usually result in a thread context switch and associated kernel transition which at times can be...

This is an article in a series of blog entries describing a set of new Coordination Data Structures (CDS) introduced in the June 2008 CTP of the Parallel Extensions for .NET Framework . LazyInit<T> provides support for several common patterns of lazy initialization. In here we will explore some...

Some more stuff to remember when dealing with self-replicating tasks. (See my earlier post for an introduction to Parallel FX and self-replicating tasks): - Self-replicating tasks should have an inter-replica communication mechanism for communicating the progress/details of the activity. This depends...

PLINQ is built on top of the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and promises to revolutionise the way we write programs that can benefit from the multi-core processor era. But how does it work internally? This article assumes that you are familiar with the basics of LINQ and have an understanding PLINQ and...

Task Parallel Library (TPL) allows you to easily cancel tasks. Effectively you need to call the Cancel method on the task in question. Imagine the simple sample below: Task task1 = Task .Create(Foo, 10000); static void Foo( object o) { for ( int i = 0; i < ( int )o; i++) { // some...

In his blog , Eric Eilebrecht explains why when writing multithreaded applications today we should stick to the weak ECMA memory model instead of CLR’s much stronger memory model. In principal, I have no issue with using a weaker model than the CLR memory model but my main concern is that “at what...

Memory is usually a shared resource on multithreaded systems therefore access to it must be regulated and fully specified. This specification is often called a “Memory Model”. Optimisations performed by compilers and the emergence of multi-core processors are some of the factors testing the agility...

The Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft has recently launched the Parallel Computing Development Centre along with our first CTP of Parallel FX . In here, I will explore some aspects of the framework. If you feel comfortable with the basics of concurrency then read on. There is obviously...

If you have ever used the System.Threading.ReaderWriterLock to achieve synchronised access to shared resources which are frequently read but infrequently updated then you probably know why we have created a new Reader/Write lock. In this MSDN Magazine’s concurrent affairs column , Jeffery Richter explains...

Before a thread can call into a COM object it has to define its apartment by declaring whether it will enter a single-threaded apartment (STA) or a multi-threaded apartment (MTA). STA client threads call CoInitialize(NULL) or CoInitializeEx(0, COINIT_APARTMENTTHREADED) to enter an STA apartment and MTA...

Each .NET CLR based process is given a pool of threads. The size of the thread pool is configurable however by default the maximum number of threads created by the thread pool is set to 1000 IO threads in total, and 25 worker threads per logical or physical processor. In other words, when using a dual...