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


Until now, we learned about Task Parallel Library, the latest asynchronous programming infrastructure from Microsoft. It allows us to design our program in a modular manner, combining different asynchronous operations together.

Unfortunately, it is still difficult to understand the actual program flow when reading such a program. In a large program, there will be numerous tasks and continuations that depend on each other, continuations that run other continuations, continuations for exception handling, and they are all gathered together in the program code in very different places. Therefore, to understand the sequence of which operation goes first and what happens next becomes a very challenging problem.

Another issue to watch out for is to see if the proper synchronization context is propagated to each asynchronous task that could touch user interface controls. It is only permitted to use these controls from the UI thread; else, we would get a multithreaded access exception...