This week we released an update to the community technology preview (CTP) of Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework.

 

Parallel Extensions simplifies development of concurrent applications by providing library-based support for introducing concurrency into applications written with any .NET language, including C# and Visual Basic.NET.

 

The library is made up of the following components:

  • The Task Parallel Library (TPL), which provides support for imperative data and task parallelism.
  • Parallel LINQ (PLINQ), which provides support for declarative data parallelism.
  • Coordination Data Structures (CDS), which provide support for work coordination and managing shared state.

This CTP is for developers who write applications or libraries using .NET and who want to easily express concurrency in their code.  Parallel Extensions works with any .NET language, though it is best used in languages that support anonymous methods or lambda expressions, like C#, Visual Basic, and F#.  Parallel Extensions requires the .NET Framework 3.5 (either RTM or SP1).

 

This CTP, which is an upgrade from the one released last November, provides several additions and improvements including changing the prototype runtime used by the Task Parallel Library (TPL) with one built from the ground up to be more robust, efficient, and scalable.  TPL also exposes new functionality, including methods for continuations.  PLINQ has been outfitted with several new methods, including those for exposing order-preservation capabilities in a new manner and it has been modified to run on top of TPL.  There are also new synchronization and coordination types to enable the development of parallel applications.

 

The CTP can be downloaded here.

 

Namaste!