Parallel Extensions for .Net Framework will be included in .Net 4.0

I has been a while since I wrote a post on parallel programming. Since that time a lot has happend in field of parallel programming.

Microsoft has been working hard on implementing the Parallel Extensions for .Net Framewok (PFX) and has now anounced that it will be a core part of the next version of the .Net Framework (right into mscorlib.dll). See the post on the PFX blog PFX blog . If you are interested in Parallel programming I strongly recomend reading up on the PFX blog. I also expect more details to be anounced at the upcoming PDC (to bad I won't be there).

FPX includes a task scheduler that promisses to scale well beyond two of four CPU's / cores and allowes LINQ to objects queries to be executed parallel (PLINQ). The later, and probably lesser known aditions include so called Coordination Data Structures (CDS) these include thread safe collection classes, like stacks an queues. One of my personal favorites of the CDS is LazyInit<T>. LazyInit is a smart little helper class that makes it easy to implement Lazy Initialization of fields or local variables, of course this is done thread safe so that it can be used in parallel scenario's.

Can't wait to use these new goodies in real life projects!