Book Image

Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices

By : Peter Ritchie
Book Image

Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices

By: Peter Ritchie

Overview of this book

When you are developing on the Microsoft platform, Visual Studio 2010 offers you a range of powerful tools and makes the whole process easier and faster. After learning it, if you are think that you can sit back and relax, you cannot be further away from truth. To beat the crowd, you need to be better than others, learn tips and tricks that other don't know yet. This book is a compilation of the best practices of programming with Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2010 best practices will take you through the practices that you need to master programming with .NET Framework. The book goes on to detail several practices involving many aspects of software development with Visual Studio. These practices include debugging and exception handling and design. It details building and maintaining a recommended practices library and the criteria by which to document recommended practices The book begins with practices on source code control (SCC). It includes different types of SCC and discusses how to choose them based on different scenarios. Advanced syntax in C# is then covered with practices covering generics, iterator methods, lambdas, and closures. The next set of practices focus on deployment as well as creating MSI deployments with Windows Installer XML (WiX)óincluding Windows applications and services. The book then takes you through practices for developing with WCF and Web Service. The software development lifecycle is completed with practices on testing like project structure, naming, and the different types of automated tests. Topics like test coverage, continuous testing and deployment, and mocking are included. Although this book uses Visual Studio as example, you can use these practices with any IDE.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Thread synchronization


Trying to reason about the asynchronicity of interactions of threads that occur with multithreading is the hard part of multithreading. If you spin up a bunch of threads that work entirely independently and have no results to deal with, there isn't much thinking you need to do. But that's almost never the case.

There are two basic reasons for using multithreading. One is to simply keep a user interface responsive by doing lengthy operations on a background thread. The other is to make use of multiple CPUs to scale an application, or make it take less time processing. There's kind of a third scenario when it comes to multithreading, that is the recognition of asynchronous operations and the avoidance of blocking a thread to wait for an asynchronous operation.

Each scenario has some slightly different synchronization subtleties, but let's first take a look at some fundamental ways of synchronizing data access across threads.

Thread safety

There are many ways of ensuring...