Book Image

Parallel Programming and Concurrency with C# 10 and .NET 6

By : Alvin Ashcraft
5 (1)
Book Image

Parallel Programming and Concurrency with C# 10 and .NET 6

5 (1)
By: Alvin Ashcraft

Overview of this book

.NET has included managed threading capabilities since the beginning, but early techniques had inherent risks: memory leaks, thread synchronization issues, and deadlocks. This book will help you avoid those pitfalls and leverage the modern constructs available in .NET 6 and C# 10, while providing recommendations on patterns and best practices for parallelism and concurrency. Parallel, concurrent, and asynchronous programming are part of every .NET application today, and it becomes imperative for modern developers to understand how to effectively use these techniques. This book will teach intermediate-level .NET developers how to make their applications faster and more responsive with parallel programming and concurrency in .NET and C# with practical examples. The book starts with the essentials of multi-threaded .NET development and explores how the language and framework constructs have evolved along with .NET. You will later get to grips with the different options available today in .NET 6, followed by insights into best practices, debugging, and unit testing. By the end of this book, you will have a deep understanding of why, when, and how to employ parallelism and concurrency in any .NET application.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1:Introduction to Threading in .NET
6
Part 2: Parallel Programming and Concurrency with C#
12
Part 3: Advanced Concurrency Concepts

Switching and flagging threads

The Threads window provides so much power when debugging a multithreaded application. We touched on some of these features in the previous section. In this section, we will learn how to switch threads, flag threads, and freeze or thaw a thread. Let’s start by switching between threads in our BackgroundPingConsoleApp project.

Switching threads

You can switch context to a different thread by using the context menu in the Threads window. Run the project and wait for the debugger to pause at the breakpoint in our anonymous method. While the execution is paused in the debugger, right-click on the Main Thread row and select Switch to Thread. The cursor in the debugger should switch positions to the Console.ReadLine() statement. This is where the main thread is waiting for the user to press any key in the console:

Figure 10.6 – Switching threads in the Visual Studio debugger

You can see how this function could be...