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


Programming requires understanding and knowledge of basic data structures and algorithms. To choose the best-suited data structure for a concurrent situation, a programmer has to know about many things, such as algorithm time, space complexity, and big O notation. In different well-known scenarios, we always know which data structures are more efficient.

For concurrent computations, we need to have appropriate data structures. These data structures have to be scalable, avoid locks when possible, and at the same time provide thread-safe access. The .NET framework, since Version 4, has the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace with several data structures in it. In this chapter, we will cover several data structures and show very simple examples of how to use them.

Let us start with ConcurrentQueue. This collection uses atomic Compare and Swap (CAS) operations and SpinWait to ensure thread safety. It implements a First In First Out (FIFO) collection, which means that the items...