Parallel Extensions simplifies development by providing library-based support for introducing concurrency into applications written with any .NET language, including C# and Visual Basic. It includes the Task Parallel Library (TPL), which provides imperative data and task parallelism; Parallel LINQ (PLINQ), which provides declarative data parallelism; and all new Coordination Data Structures (CDS), which provide support for work coordination and managing shared state.
In addition to CDS, this upgrade provides several improvements, including a new scheduler that is more robust, efficient, and scalable. TPL also exposes new functionality, including methods for continuations. PLINQ now runs on top of TPL, clarifies order-preservation, and provides several new operators.
The June CTP works with the .NET Framework 3.5 as a simple, small-footprint installation that drops a single DLL, documentation, samples, and registers the DLL with Visual Studio 2008.
Here, we meet some of the key engineers of the Microsoft Parallel Computing Platform (which includes the Parallel Extensions for .NET...): Lead Developer Joe Duffy, Developer Huseyin Yildiz, Developer Igor Ostrovsky, Program Manager Stephen Toub and Program Manager Ed Essey.
We dig deeply into a lot of topics related to parallelism and conconcurency and how the new additions to the platform enable developers to exploit multi/many core processors in an elegant way.
Enjoy part 1. Part 2 is here.