Parallel Programming with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, Step by Step

**Your hands-on, step-by-step guide to the fundamentals of parallel programming** Teach yourself how to help improve application performance by using parallel programming techniques in Visual Studio 2010—one step at a time. Ideal for experienced programmers with little or no parallel programming experience, this tutorial provides practical, learn-by-doing exercises for creating applications that optimize the use of multicore processors. Discover how to: * Apply techniques to help increase your application's speed and efficiency * Simplify the process of adding parallelism with the Task Parallel Library (TPL) * Execute several tasks concurrently with various scheduling techniques * Perform data queries in parallel with PLINQ * Use concurrent collections in Microsoft .NET Framework 4 for data items * Extend classes in the TPL to meet the specific requirements of your application * Perform live debugging of an application with parallel code Show C# and VB.NET programmers how to effectively take advantage of the multicore capabilities of modern PCs using the Microsoft platform. The CPU meter shows the problem. One core is running at 100 percent, but all the other cores are idle. Your application is CPU-bound, but you are using only a fraction of the computing power of your multicore system. What next? The answer, in a nutshell, is parallel programming. Where you once would have written the kind of sequential code that is familiar to all programmers, you now find that this no longer meets your performance goals. To use your system's CPU resources efficiently, you need to split your application into pieces that can run at the same time. This is easier said than done. Parallel programming has a reputation for being the domain of experts and a minefield of subtle, hard-to-reproduce software defects. Everyone seems to have a favorite story about a parallel program that did not behave as expected because of a mysterious bug. These stories should inspire a healthy respect for the difficulty of the problems you face in writing your own parallel programs. Fortunately, help has arrived. Microsoft Visual Studio(R) 2010 introduces a new programming model for parallelism that significantly simplifies the job. Behind the scenes are supporting libraries with sophisticated algorithms that dynamically distribute computations on multicore architectures. Proven design patterns are another source of help. A Guide to Parallel Programming introduces you to the most important and frequently used patterns of parallel programming and gives executable code samples for them, using the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and Parallel LINQ (PLINQ)

Your hands-on, step-by-step guide to the fundamentals of parallel programming

Teach yourself how to help improve application performance by using parallel programming techniques in Visual Studio 2010—one step at a time. Ideal for experienced programmers with little or no parallel programming experience, this tutorial provides practical, learn-by-doing exercises for creating applications that optimize the use of multicore processors.

Discover how to:

• Apply techniques to help increase your application's speed and efficiency
• Simplify the process of adding parallelism with the Task Parallel Library (TPL)
• Execute several tasks concurrently with various scheduling techniques
• Perform data queries in parallel with PLINQ
• Use concurrent collections in Microsoft .NET Framework 4 for data items
• Extend classes in the TPL to meet the specific requirements of your application
• Perform live debugging of an application with parallel code