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Concurrent Programming on Windows

By Doug Holland (Intel) (234 posts) on December 4, 2008 at 1:10 pm

While attending Microsoft's PDC in October I began reading a new book from Addison Wesley entitled Concurrent Programming on Windows by Joe Duffy.

Although the book does not cover many of the new improvements within the .net framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 designed to support parallel programming, it is definately worth reading. On one hand these new tools will not release until late next year and on the other hand reading this book before will help you to understand why Microsoft has added the Task Parallel Library to the .net framework.

If you were unable to attend Microsoft PDC then you should also consider watching the online sessions on parallelism here or even better go ahead and attend one of the MSDN conferences coming to a city near you.

Categories: Software Engineering

Comments (12)

December 5, 2008 1:17 AM PST effinya Total Points: 10 Registered User

can it run on vista 64?

December 5, 2008 7:45 AM PST Doug Holland (Intel) Total Points: 12,755 Status Points: 12,755 Black Belt

I'm not sure what you mean by the question, although the book samples will run on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows. You're probably safe with any desktop or server version of Windows after and including Windows XP. - Doug

December 5, 2008 6:15 PM PST Richard B.

Is this book also suitable for C++ native Win32 API developers, or is it just geared towards .NET (ie. C# and C++ with CLR) ? Is any of the code in C++ ?

December 5, 2008 9:46 PM PST Joe Duffy

Doug, Thanks for the plug. Richard, The book covers both C++ and .NET. As of .NET 3.5, most of its threading features are thin veneers atop the core Windows OS support anyhow. Regards, ---joe

December 8, 2008 10:50 AM PST Doug Holland (Intel) Total Points: 12,755 Status Points: 12,755 Black Belt

Hey Joe, Awesome to see you commenting here and it really is a book that is long overdue for Windows programmers. Given where we stand at the moment in that parallelism is really the only way to continue to achieve higher performance the developer community really needs to learn parallelism overnight. It represents a great opportunity for those to accept the challenge!!! - Doug

December 8, 2008 11:45 PM PST Marble Host

Hi Doug Can you say from where I can get this book ?

December 9, 2008 9:50 AM PST Doug Holland (Intel) Total Points: 12,755 Status Points: 12,755 Black Belt

You can get the book by clicking the title or book cover in the above post...

January 25, 2009 6:24 PM PST Tom Pattson

I've read Joe's book. It is an amazing piece of work. However, I need more real-life situations. It is very difficult for me to rewrite my C# applications. I've received a new book for beginners by Packt Publishing RSS: "C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming: Beginner’s Guide", by Gaston Hillar - http://www.packtpub.com/beginners-guide-for-C-sharp-2008-and.....mming/book Has anyone read it? It is available as e-Book, but I don't like to read PDFs, I want a book. The table of contents sounds interesting.

February 12, 2009 12:43 PM PST Doug Holland (Intel) Total Points: 12,755 Status Points: 12,755 Black Belt

Hey Tom, I'm not familiar with the book you mention although I believe there are other books in the works at the moment, especially with VS2010 focusing so heavily on multicore programming. - Doug

February 13, 2009 2:19 AM PST Tom Pattson

@Doug, I finally bought the book "C# 2008 and 2005 threaded programming". It includes contents about PLINQ and Parallel Extensions. The book has great examples. It's been very usuful for me, combining everything I've learned from Joe's book with this new one, was very helpful. I'm not keen on using beta versions or CTPs. I prefer working with real versions. :) I'll let Microsoft fans and evangelists DEBUG VS 2010 until there is a SP 1. Tom

February 13, 2009 1:02 PM PST Doug Holland (Intel) Total Points: 12,755 Status Points: 12,755 Black Belt

Hey Tom, Thanks for the comment about the threading book and waiting for SP1 of VS2010. I actually just posted a new blog post about the associated risk with adopting an initial release or a service release here: http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/02/13/visual-stud.....-adoption/ Let me know what you think... - Doug

March 12, 2009 9:00 PM PDT Gastón C. Hillar Total Points: 3,181 Status Points: 3,181 Black Belt

This book is worth reading for any .Net developer interested in writing threaded / parallel / concurrent applications. I am currently teaching parallel programming and it is the book that covers the most important conceptual and technical topics related to concurrent programming on Windows. Joe created PLINQ... A must in a developer's library. I am a writer, I've also written the book that Tom Pattson talks about, and I enjoyed reading Joe's book.

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