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, save battery power by running only the programs 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# programming language, this book will be a perfect starting point for programming applications that have good performance and responsiveness.
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 topic based on the information from previous chapters, and end with real-world parallel programming patterns and Windows Store application samples.
Chapter 1, Threading Basics, introduces 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 a thread pool concept. It shows how to use a thread pool, how to work with asynchronous operations, and good and bad practices of using a thread pool.
Chapter 4, Using Task Parallel Library, is a deep dive into a Task Parallel Library framework. This chapter outlines every important aspect of TPL, including tasks combination, exceptions management, and operations cancellation.
Chapter 5, Using C# 5.0, explains in detail the new C# 5.0 feature – asynchronous methods. You will find out what 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 standard data structures for parallel algorithms included in the .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 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 common parallel programming problem solutions.
Chapter 11, There's More, covers the aspects of programming asynchronous applications for Windows 8. You will learn how to work with Windows 8 asynchronous APIs, and how to perform background work in Windows Store applications.
For most of the recipes, you will need Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop. Recipes in Chapter 11 will require Windows 8 and Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8 to compile Windows Store applications.
Multithreading in C# 5.0 Cookbook 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 C# and .NET ecosystem.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish among 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 we construct a thread, an instance of the ThreadStart or ParameterizedThreadStart delegate is passed to the constructor."
A block of code is set as follows:
static void PrintNumbers()
{
Console.WriteLine("Starting...");
for (int i = 1; i < 10; i++)
{
Console.WriteLine(i);
}
}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: "Start Visual Studio 2012. Create a new C# Console Application project."
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