PDC Pre-Conference: Concurrent and Parallel Programming

Today I finally started the business-related (but still entertaining!) part of my trip - the PDC pre-conference day.  I attended the track on concurrent and parallel programming, which was led by Stephen Toub, David Callahan and Joe Duffy.

All in all, there was nothing astonishingly new in the talk - they covered parallelism and concurrency in general (and established a common vocabulary), threads in Windows, in .NET in particular, discussed the Asynchronous Programming Model (APM - a.k.a. Delegate.BeginInvoke) and at the end of the talk there was some time to discuss the Parallel Extensions for .NET, which will be released as part of the .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 wave.

Because all of the above has been disclosed and discussed before, I feel happy enough to reference past posts covering some (if not most) of the material presented today as far as the future release of Parallel Extensions is concerned:

• Synchronization primitives
• Task management
• Collection classes
• Concurrency patterns - read-write cache, thread-local cache, safe/unsafe cache, lock-free operations, cyclic lock-free buffer, spinlock and immutability
• Known issues (up to date with the June 2008 CTP - the PDC release might be different)

One new thing though - as part of the .NET release, the concurrency data structures, the parallelization technologies (including PLINQ and the Parallel class) and all the rest of the cake - will be included in mscorlib.dll, System.dll and System.Core.dll.  This means Parallel Extensions are not really a set of external extensions - they will be an integral part of the .NET framework and of our general programming paradigm.

In the next few days there will be lots of exciting announcements at the PDC, so this is a good time to refresh your blog reader every couple of minutes!