Parallel Development in Visual Studio

What are symbols? Today we will be discussing how to configure your symbol path inside Visual Studio 2010.   One might ask, “Why do I need to do this?”   To answer that let us define what symbols are .   Here are some excerpts from http...

Hello world!  This is the first of four "beginner's guide" installments.  Though individiuals more familiar with concurrency issues may find it easier to get started with our tools, my team and I are interested in making it easier...

One of the samples that is included with the Parallel Programming Samples for .NET 4 is a simple Ray Tracer.  This ray tracer provides a nice visual way of seeing the benefits of .NET 4 parallelism features, as well as giving insights into the way...

We instrumented The Concurrency Visualizer within Visual Studio 2010’s profiler via Event Tracing for Windows (ETW), which depends on a number of buffers to cache data before writing it to disk. If The Concurrency Visualizer complains of lost kernel and...

Our “Rogues Gallery” is a collection of common, visual patterns exhibiting poorly-behaved multithreaded applications. In this post, I’ll introduce a new pattern: too much pressure on the garbage collector (GC). When an application...

I created an application which uses a Parallel.For loop to create some data and another Parallel.For loop to make comparisons in the data set. This process is repeated a hundred times, with each iteration having a slightly bigger data set. The data is...

The Concurrency Visualizer displays rich data related to CPU thread behavior, DirectX activity, and disk I/O, among other things. This information can be incredibly valuable when investigating application behavior, but sometimes it's difficult to quickly...

This post explores the performance issues that arise when using PLINQ to parallelize queries, and illustrates how the Concurrency Visualizer in Visual Studio 2010 can be a valuable tool in identifying performance bottlenecks and making efficient and profitable...

Dustin Metzgar recently posted an entry centered around understanding how ASP .NET and WCF work in order to avoid unnecessarily blocking threads.  He used a couple of different tools to examine the problem, including the Concurrency Visualizer. ...

I noticed several instances of folks struggling to find the Concurrency Visualizer in Visual Studio 2010, only to find that the problem was system requirements.   I’ll shed some light on this here: The Concurrency Visualizer is only available in...

In this entry, I will describe an important parallel programming concept, data parallelism. I will then show data parallelism in action by presenting a simplified implementation of the Jacobi Relaxation algorithm. Data Parallelism In general, data parallelism...

This entry will demonstrate the use of Concurrency Visualizer profile reports to locate the source of lock contention in a parallel matrix multiplication app. The Problem In this hypothetical example, suppose that my coworker, a more junior developer...

Dustin Metzgar recently posted an entry which describes an interesting performance scenario in WCF. He used a couple of different tools to examine the problem, including the Concurrency Visualizer. See his entry here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dmetzgar...

In UI programming, it’s easy to unwittingly make inefficient use of computing resources by blocking or executing long running tasks on the main thread rather than dispatching work to worker threads when advantageous.   It is good practice to dispatch...

In the previous entry , I described basic usage scenarios of the Concurrency Visualizer SDK.  In this entry, I will illustrate techniques to gain tighter control over the way you visualize meaningful events in your application. The Application To...

This is the picture that Concurrency Visualizer team used on the title page of internal specs. It actually reveals how most of us think about our product: not as a profiler (though you can get decent sample profile from it by clicking the green “Execution...

Ever wonder which of these profiling options to select?  Find out here . James Rapp - Parallel Computing Platform

In previous blog entries, we illustrated how to use the Performance Wizard to quickly start a performance session to profile runs of your application. In this post we will illustrate how to use the Performance Explorer to accomplish the same task. Using...

Ian Davis has written this blog entry , which investigates the performance of several matrix multiplication implementations, including an implementation parallelized with the Task Parallel Library.  It’s a very interesting and informative read; be...

There are two types of Scenario Marker in the Concurrency Visualizer: those which you instrument yourself to demarcate user-defined application phases and those which appear automatically and demarcate particular runtime constructs.  While Hazim...

Stephen Toub                                                                                                      ...

There are multiple ways for a computer to solve permutation problems. In an exercise to show the performance of different solutions, I created a couple of different ways to solve the problem of knowing if a certain sequence could be transformed to another...

In an earlier post I explained why you may get stacks that do not look like what you were expecting when you have FPO optimizations, but even without FPO enabled there are some other scenarios that can cause your application stacks to look somehow “unexpected”...

In the application I am working on, there is a small array of objects (10 - 100 items) and a large array of objects (10,000 - 100,000). I want to know how close each object in the small array is to each object in the large array. Since calculating the...

In this entry, I’ll dive deep into the following features of the Threads View in the Concurrency Visualizer : Thread Sorting Thread Hiding Visible Timeline Profile Interactivity Jumping to Code Thread Ready Connector Thread Sorting By default, threads...