Book Image

Multithreading in C# 5.0 Cookbook

By : Evgenii Agafonov
Book Image

Multithreading in C# 5.0 Cookbook

By: Evgenii Agafonov

Overview of this book

In an age when computer processors are being developed to contain more and more cores, multithreading is a key factor for creating scalable, effective, and responsive applications. If you fail to do it correctly, it can lead to puzzling problems that take a huge amount of time to resolve. Therefore, having a solid understanding of multithreading is a must for the modern application developer. Multithreading in C# 5.0 Cookbook is an easy-to-understand guide to the most puzzling programming problems. This book will guide you through practical examples dedicated to various aspects of multithreading in C# on Windows and will give you a good basis of practical knowledge which you can then use to program your own scalable and reliable multithreaded applications. This book guides you through asynchronous and parallel programming from basic examples to practical, real-world solutions to complex problems. You will start from the very beginning, learning what a thread is, and then proceed to learn new concepts based on the information you get from the previous examples. After describing the basics of threading, you will be able to grasp more advanced concepts like Task Parallel Library and C# asynchronous functions. Then, we move towards parallel programming, starting with basic data structures and gradually progressing to the more advanced patterns. The book concludes with a discussion of the specifics of Windows 8 application programming, giving you a complete understanding of how Windows 8 applications are different and how to program asynchronous applications for Windows 8.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Multithreading in C# 5.0 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


In the previous chapters, we discussed several ways to create threads and organize their cooperation. Now let's consider another scenario where we create many asynchronous operations that take very little time to complete. As we discussed in the Introduction section of Chapter 1, Threading Basics, creating a thread is an expensive operation, so doing this for each short-lived, asynchronous operation will include a significant overhead expense.

To deal with this problem, there is a common approach called pooling that can be successfully applied to any situation when we need many short-lived, expensive resources. We allocate a certain amount of those resources in advance, and organize them into a resource pool. Each time we need a new resource, we just take it from the pool, instead of creating a new one, and return it to the pool after the resource is no longer needed.

The .NET thread pool is an implementation of this concept. It is accessible via the System.Threading.ThreadPool...