Book Image

Hands-On Parallel Programming with C# 8 and .NET Core 3

By : Shakti Tanwar
Book Image

Hands-On Parallel Programming with C# 8 and .NET Core 3

By: Shakti Tanwar

Overview of this book

In today’s world, every CPU has a multi-core processor. However, unless your application has implemented parallel programming, it will fail to utilize the hardware’s full processing capacity. This book will show you how to write modern software on the optimized and high-performing .NET Core 3 framework using C# 8. Hands-On Parallel Programming with C# 8 and .NET Core 3 covers how to build multithreaded, concurrent, and optimized applications that harness the power of multi-core processors. Once you’ve understood the fundamentals of threading and concurrency, you’ll gain insights into the data structure in .NET Core that supports parallelism. The book will then help you perform asynchronous programming in C# and diagnose and debug parallel code effectively. You’ll also get to grips with the new Kestrel server and understand the difference between the IIS and Kestrel operating models. Finally, you’ll learn best practices such as test-driven development, and run unit tests on your parallel code. By the end of the book, you’ll have developed a deep understanding of the core concepts of concurrency and asynchrony to create responsive applications that are not CPU-intensive.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Fundamentals of Threading, Multitasking, and Asynchrony
6
Section 2: Data Structures that Support Parallelism in .NET Core
10
Section 3: Asynchronous Programming Using C#
13
Section 4: Debugging, Diagnostics, and Unit Testing for Async Code
16
Section 5: Parallel Programming Feature Additions to .NET Core

Tasks

Tasks are abstractions in .NET that provide units of asynchrony, just like promises in JavaScript. In initial versions of .NET, we had to rely on threads only, which were created either directly or using the ThreadPool class. The ThreadPool class provided a managed abstraction layer over threads but developers still relied on the Thread class for better control. By creating a thread via the Thread class, we gained access to the underlying object, which we can wait for, cancel, or move to the foreground or background. In real time, however, we required threads to perform work continuously. This required us to write lots of code, which was difficult to maintain. The Thread class was also unmanaged, which put a high burden on both the memory and the CPU. We needed the best of both worlds, which is where tasks come to the rescue. A task is nothing but a wrapper over a thread...