Book Image

.NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions Cookbook

By : Bryan Freeman
Book Image

.NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions Cookbook

By: Bryan Freeman

Overview of this book

<p>.NET parallel extensions brings the power of parallel and asynchronous programming to a much wider developer audience than ever before. This book will give a developer with no multithreaded development experience the ability to write highly scalable parallel applications that take advantage of modern multicore processors.If you are an experienced .NET developer who wants to put parallel extensions to work in your applications, this book is for you.</p> <p>".NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions Cookbook" is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a number of clear step-by-step recipes that will introduce parallelism into your applications and take advantage of modern multicore processors. This book is a crash course in using the extensions, with theory and concepts kept to a minimum.</p> <p>".NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions Cookbook" offers a wide-ranging presentation of parallel development concepts, and provides a working knowledge of key technologies that are important to developers who want to take advantage of multi-core architectures.</p> <p>You will learn how to compose a series of producer/consumer tasks into a pipeline that can process data elements received from a real-time event stream. You will also learn how to connect the stages of pipelines together using the concurrent collections. You will learn everything you need to know to transform the multicore power found in modern processors into application performance and scalability.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
.NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using a mutual exclusion lock


Locking is essential in parallel programs. It restricts code from being executed by more than one thread at the same time. Exclusive locking is used to ensure that only one thread can enter a particular section of code at a time.

The simplest way to use synchronization in c# is with the lock keyword. The lock keyword works by marking a block of code as a critical section by obtaining a mutual exclusion lock for an object running a statement and then releasing the lock.

In this recipe, we are going to create a class that represents a bank account. An object of this class will be shared by a couple of parallel tasks that will be making a series of withdrawals for random amounts. The critical section of code in the Withdraw method that updates the balance of the shared account object will be protected by a lock statement.

How to do it…

Let's go to Visual Studio 2012 and take a look at the following steps on how to use mutual exclusion locks:

  1. Start a new project using...