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 already discussed how important it is to use asynchronous input/output operations properly. Why does it matter so much? To have a solid understanding, let us consider two kinds of applications.

If we run an application on the client, one of the most important things is to have a responsive user interface. This means that no matter what is happening with the application, all user interface elements, such as buttons and progress bars, keep running fast, and the user gets an immediate reaction from the application. This is not easy to achieve! If you try to open the notepad text editor in Windows and try to load a text document that is several megabytes in size, the application window will be frozen for a significant amount of time because the whole text is being loaded from the disk first, and only then the program starts to process user input.

This is an extremely important issue, and in this situation, the only solution is to avoid blocking the UI...