Patterns for Parallel Programming: Understanding and Applying Parallel Patterns with the .NET Framework 4, by Stephen Toub

Stephen Toub wrote this document, as he calls it, but that is so full of useful information that it can be considered a reference book. A 118 pages PDF, Patterns for Parallel Programming taught me a lot of things about .NET parallel programming (although most of them I should have known already :-().

Toub is a program manager lead on the Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft, the smart people that gave us Task<T>, Parallel, but also await/async. The team was formed in 2006 and it had the responsibility of helping Microsoft get ready for the shift to multicore and many-core. They had broad responsibility around the company but were centered in the Developer Division because they believed the impact of this fundamental shift in how programming is done was mostly going to be on software developers.

It is important to understand that this document was last updated in 2010 and still some of the stuff there was new to me. However, some of the concepts detailed in there are timeless, like what is important to share and distribute in a parallel programming scenario. The end of the document is filled with advanced code that I would have trouble understanding even after reading this, that is why I believe you should keep this PDF somewhere close, in order to reread relevant parts when doing parallel programming. The document is free to download from Microsoft and I highly recommend it to all .NET developers out there.

Date Published: 7/16/2010 File Size: 1.5 MB