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

Using the thread pool

There are other ways to use ThreadPool threads in a .NET application. Let’s discuss a situation where you want to accomplish the same result that was achieved with async and await in the previous example, but the methods to fetch the order data are not marked as async. One option is to update the methods to be async. If that code is not within your control to change, you have some other options available.

The ThreadPool class has a method called QueueUserWorkItem. This method accepts a method to call and queues it for execution on the thread pool. We could use it with our project like this:

ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(GetCurrentOrders);

There are a few problems with using this method. The primary issue is that there is no return value to get the list of orders from the method call. You could work around this issue with some wrapper methods that update a shared thread-safe collection such as the BlockingCollection. That isn’t a great design...