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

Leveraging background threads

In Chapter 1, we learned how to create background threads and discussed some of their uses. Background threads have a lower priority than the primary thread of the process and other thread pool threads. In addition, active background threads will not prevent the user or the system from terminating the application.

This means that background threads are perfect for tasks such as the following:

  • Writing log and analytics data
  • Monitoring network or filesystem resources
  • Reading data into the application

Do not use background threads for critical application operations such as the following:

  • Saving application state
  • Performing database transactions
  • Application data processing

A good rule to follow when deciding whether some work can be processed by a background thread is to ask yourself whether abruptly interrupting the work to close the application would risk the data integrity of the system. So, how do you know...