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

Lazy initialization with thread-local storage

In multithreaded programming, we often want to create a variable that is local to a thread, which means that each thread will have its own copy of the data. This holds true for all local variables, but global variables are always shared across threads. In old versions of .NET, we used the ThreadStatic attribute to make a static variable behave as a thread-local variable. However, this is not foolproof and doesn't work well with initialization. If we are initializing a ThreadStatic variable, then only the first thread gets the initialized value, whereas the rest of the threads get the default value of the variable, which is 0 in the case of an integer. This can be demonstrated using the following code:

 [ThreadStatic]
static int counter = 1;
public static void Main()
{
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
Task.Factory...