Preface
Not so long ago, a typical personal computer CPU had only one computing core, and the power consumption was enough to cook fried eggs on it. In 2005, Intel introduced its first multiple-core CPU, and since then, computers started developing in a different direction. Low-power consumption and a number of computing cores became more important than a row computing core performance. This lead to programming paradigm changes as well. Now, we need to learn how to use all CPU cores effectively to achieve the best performance, and at the same time, we need to save battery power by running only the programs that we need at a particular time. Besides that, we need to program server applications in a way to use multiple CPU cores or even multiple computers as efficiently as possible to support as many users as we can.
To be able to create such applications, you have to learn to use multiple CPU cores in your programs effectively. If you use the Microsoft .NET development platform and C#, this book will be a perfect starting point for you to program fast and responsive applications.
The purpose of this book is to provide you with a step-by-step guide for multithreading and parallel programming in C#. We will start with the basic concepts, going through more and more advanced topics based on the information from previous chapters, and we will end with real-world parallel programming patterns, Universal Windows applications, and cross-platform applications samples.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Threading Basics, introduces the basic operations with threads in C#. It explains what a thread is, the pros and cons of using threads, and other important thread aspects.
Chapter 2, Thread Synchronization, describes thread interaction details. You will learn why we need to coordinate threads together and the different ways of organizing thread coordination.
Chapter 3, Using a Thread Pool, explains the thread pool concept. It shows how to use a thread pool, how to work with asynchronous operations, and the good and bad practices of using a thread pool.
Chapter 4, Using the Task Parallel Library, is a deep dive into the Task Parallel Library (TPL) framework. This chapter outlines every important aspect of TPL, including task combination, exception management, and operation cancelation.
Chapter 5, Using C# 6.0, explains in detail the recently introduced C# feature—asynchronous methods. You will find out what the async and await keywords mean, how to use them in different scenarios, and how await works under the hood.
Chapter 6, Using Concurrent Collections, describes the standard data structures for parallel algorithms included in .NET Framework. It goes through sample programming scenarios for each data structure.
Chapter 7, Using PLINQ, is a deep dive into the Parallel LINQ infrastructure. The chapter describes task and data parallelism, parallelizing a LINQ query, tweaking parallelism options, partitioning a query, and aggregating the parallel query result.
Chapter 8, Reactive Extensions, explains how and when to use the Reactive Extensions framework. You will learn how to compose events and how to perform a LINQ query against an event sequence.
Chapter 9, Using Asynchronous I/O, covers in detail the asynchronous I/O process, including files, networks, and database scenarios.
Chapter 10, Parallel Programming Patterns, outlines the solutions to common parallel programming problems.
Chapter 11, There's More, covers the aspects of programming asynchronous applications for Windows 10, OS X, and Linux. You will learn how to work with Windows 10 asynchronous APIs and how to perform the background work in Universal Windows applications. Also, you will get familiar with cross-platform .NET development tools and components.
What you need for this book
For most of the recipes, you will need Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2015. The recipes in Chapter 11, There's more, for OS X and Linux will optionally require the Visual Studio Code editor. However, you can use any specific editor you are familiar with.
Who this book is for
This book is written for existing C# developers with little or no background in multithreading and asynchronous and parallel programming. The book covers these topics from basic concepts to complicated programming patterns and algorithms using the C# and .NET ecosystem.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "When the program is run, it creates a thread that will execute a code in the PrintNumbersWithDelay method."
A block of code is set as follows:
static void LockTooMuch(object lock1, object lock2)
{
lock (lock1)
{
Sleep(1000);
lock (lock2);
}
}Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
dotnet restore dotnet run
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Right-click on the References folder in the project, and select the Manage NuGet Packages… menu option".
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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