Book Image

Mastering C# Concurrency

Book Image

Mastering C# Concurrency

Overview of this book

Starting with the traditional approach to concurrency, you will learn how to write multithreaded concurrent programs and compose ways that won't require locking. You will explore the concepts of parallelism granularity, and fine-grained and coarse-grained parallel tasks by choosing a concurrent program structure and parallelizing the workload optimally. You will also learn how to use task parallel library, cancellations, timeouts, and how to handle errors. You will know how to choose the appropriate data structure for a specific parallel algorithm to achieve scalability and performance. Further, you'll learn about server scalability, asynchronous I/O, and thread pools, and write responsive traditional Windows and Windows Store applications. By the end of the book, you will be able to diagnose and resolve typical problems that could happen in multithreaded applications.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering C# Concurrency
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Implementing the downloading of images from Bing


Everyday Bing.com publishes its background image that can be used as desktop wallpaper. There is an XML API to get information about these pictures that can be found at http://www.bing.com/hpimagearchive.aspx.

Creating a simple synchronous solution

Let's try to write a program to download the last eight images from this site. We will start by defining objects to store image information. This is where a thumbnail image and its description will be stored:

using System.Drawing;

public class WallpaperInfo
{
  private readonly Image _thumbnail;
  private readonly string _description;

  public WallpaperInfo(Image thumbnail, string description)
  {
    _thumbnail = thumbnail;
    _description = description;
  }
 
  public Image Thumbnail
  {
    get { return _thumbnail; }
  }
 
  public string Description
  {
    get { return _description; }
  }
}

The next container type is for all the downloaded pictures and the time required to download and make...