Multithreading in C# 5.0 Cookbook

Over 70 recipes to help you learn asynchronous and parallel programming with C# 5.0 quickly and efficiently

Overview

• Delve deep into the .NET threading infrastructure and use Task Parallel Library for asynchronous programming
• Scale out your server applications effectively
• Master C# 5.0 asynchronous operations language support

In Detail

In an age when computer processors are being developed to contain more and more cores, multithreading is a key factor for creating scalable, effective, and responsive applications. If you fail to do it correctly, it can lead to puzzling problems that take a huge amount of time to resolve. Therefore, having a solid understanding of multithreading is a must for the modern application developer.

Multithreading in C# 5.0 Cookbook is an easy-to-understand guide to the most puzzling programming problems. This book will guide you through practical examples dedicated to various aspects of multithreading in C# on Windows and will give you a good basis of practical knowledge which you can then use to program your own scalable and reliable multithreaded applications.

This book guides you through asynchronous and parallel programming from basic examples to practical, real-world solutions to complex problems. You will start from the very beginning, learning what a thread is, and then proceed to learn new concepts based on the information you get from the previous examples.

After describing the basics of threading, you will be able to grasp more advanced concepts like Task Parallel Library and C# asynchronous functions. Then, we move towards parallel programming, starting with basic data structures and gradually progressing to the more advanced patterns. The book concludes with a discussion of the specifics of Windows 8 application programming, giving you a complete understanding of how Windows 8 applications are different and how to program asynchronous applications for Windows 8.

What you will learn from this book

• Work with raw threads, synchronize threads, and coordinate their work
• Develop your own asynchronous API with Task Parallel Library
• Use C# 5.0 asynchronous language features
• Scale up your server application with I/O threads
• Parallelize your LINQ queries with PLINQ
• Use common concurrent collections
• Apply different parallel programming patterns
• Work with Windows 8 asynchronous APIs
• Use Reactive Extensions to run asynchronous operations and manage their options

Approach

This book is an easy-to-follow guide full of hands-on examples of real-world multithreading tasks. Each topic is explained and placed in context, and for the more inquisitive readers, there are also more in-depth details of the concepts used.

Who this book is written for

If you are a developer or new to multithreaded programming and you are looking for a quick and easy way to get started, then this book is for you. It is assumed that you have some experience in C# and .NET already, and you should also be familiar with computer science and basic algorithms and data structure.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Threading Basics
Chapter 2: Thread Synchronization
Chapter 3: Using a Thread Pool
Chapter 4: Using Task Parallel Library
Chapter 5: Using C# 5.0
Chapter 6: Using Concurrent Collections
Chapter 7: Using PLINQ
Chapter 8: Reactive Extensions
Chapter 9: Using Asynchronous I/O
Chapter 10: Parallel Programming Patterns
Chapter 11: There’s More