Joe Duffy, author of Concurrent Programming on Windows, talks about the future of concurrency and parallelism. This interview covers his thoughts on the language designs, libraries, and patterns that are becoming increasing important in modern programming.
WPF 4.5 has improved its support for multi-threaded data binding, but the technique is still risky. This report attempts to explain how it works and what’s involved in using it safely.
The new Async CPT for VB and C# looks like it may actually make it into the core language. But with all the emphasis on multi-core systems, why is Microsoft investing so heavily in syntax for designed specifically for making single-threaded asynchronous programming easier?
C# 4.0 implemented a change that assured optimized and non -optimized compiles yielded consistent results. This "Fix" emphasized some design problems with locking mechanisms.
Concurrent Basic represents a possible future for Visual Basic. Though based on work done in C# research languages such as Polyphonic C# and C-Omega, Visual Basic was chosen for its inherent predisposition towards declarative programming. The syntax is even inspired by VB’s declarative event handlers.
Jared Parsons proposes a better thread-safe collection. By using a design pattern that strongly encourages, but not enforces, thread-safety, his API is both easy to use and easy to understand.
.NET 4 is adding support for tasks. Tasks are lightweight units of work much like queue work items, but with support for waits, continuations, and futures. Tasks can also support parent-child relationships with waits and cancellations being automatically threaded through them.
Nick Gunn provides a practical introduction the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime for .NET. CCR radically changes the way multi-threaded applications are written in .NET, shifting the focus from threads and locks to lightweight, asynchronous tasks.
While increasingly more websites are fully or partially based on AJAX, it is still difficult to develop complicated AJAX applications. What is the main issue which causes this difficulty in developing AJAX applications? Is it asynchronous communication with the server, or is it GUI programming? How can a multithreading JavaScript library help to ease some of these issues?
Features like biased locking, lock coarsening, lock elision by escape analysis and adaptive spin locking are all designed to increase concurrency by allowing more effective sharing amongst application threads. But do they actually work? In this two part article, Jeroen Borgers explores these features and attempt to answer the performance question with the aid of a single threaded benchmark.
Features like biased locking, lock coarsening, lock elision by escape analysis and adaptive spin locking are all designed to increase concurrency by allowing more effective sharing amongst application threads. But do they actually work? In this two part article, Jeroen Borgers explores these features and attempt to answer the performance question with the aid of a single threaded benchmark.
