19.11. Parallel Programming under the .NET Platform

If you go shopping at any electronic "super store," you will quickly notice that computers which support two or more CPUs (aka, cores) are commonplace. Not only are they commonplace, they are quite cost effective; dual core laptops can be purchased for less than $500.00 USD. When a machine supports multiple CPUs, it has the ability to execute threads in a parallel fashion, which can significantly improve the runtime performance of applications.

Traditionally speaking, if you wanted to build a .NET application which can distribute its workload across multiple cores, you needed to be quite skilled in multithreaded programming techniques (using many of the topics seen in this chapter). While this ...

Get Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.