Creating an attached child Task in .NET C#

August 3, 2017 Leave a comment

A child Task, a.k.a a nested Task, is a Task that’s started within the body of another Task. The containing Task is called the parent.

We saw here how to create detached child Tasks. They are not very interesting really. An attached child Task however is one which has a special relationship with the parent:

  • The parent waits for the child to finish before it completes
  • If the child Task throws an exception then the parent will catch it and re-throw it
  • The status of the parent depends on the status of the child

This is how you attach a child task to a parent:

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Continuation tasks in .NET TPL: a simple continuation example

June 13, 2017 Leave a comment

Tasks in .NET TPL make it easy to assign tasks that should run upon the completion of another task.

We’ll need a basic object with a single property:

public class Series
{
	public int CurrentValue
	{
		get;
		set;
	}
}

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Parallel LINQ in .NET C#: a basic example

June 8, 2017 Leave a comment

Parallel LINQ – PLINQ – can be applied to LINQ to Objects. This type of LINQ which works with the IEnumerable and IEnumerable of T data types. There are extension methods in the PLINQ library that make parallel processing of the result from queries available. The result is that multiple data items are processed concurrently.

In fact it is not difficult to transform a “normal” LINQ statement to PLINQ.

Set up the data source:

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Creating a detached child Task in .NET C#

June 6, 2017 Leave a comment

A child Task, a.k.a a nested Task, is a Task that’s started within the body of another Task. The containing Task is called the parent.

A detached child Task is one which doesn’t have any relationship with the parent. The detached child Task will be scheduled normally and will have no effect on the parent.

There’s nothing special about creating a detached child Task:

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Summary of thread-safe collections in .NET

May 30, 2017 Leave a comment

The System.Collections.Concurrent namespace has 4 thread-safe collections that you can use in multi-threaded applications. The starting point is that you have a multi-threaded app where the same collection needs to be accessed by different threads. In that case the well-know collection types, like HashSet, List, Dictionary etc. simply won’t be enough.

If many different threads have access to the same resource then there’s no guarantee on the state of that resource in the moment a thread accesses it in some way: deletion, lookup, insertion or modification. Another thread may have accessed the same resource just milliseconds before that and the other thread will access the resource under the wrong assumptions. You’ll end up with buggy code with unpredictable results and ad-hoc fixes and patches that probably won’t solve the root of the problem.

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Cancel multiple Tasks at once in .NET C#

May 25, 2017 1 Comment

You cannot directly interrupt a Task in .NET while it’s running. You can do it indirectly through the CancellationTokenSource object. This object has a CancellationToken property which must be passed into the constructor of the Task:

CancellationTokenSource cancellationTokenSource	= new CancellationTokenSource();
CancellationToken cancellationToken = cancellationTokenSource.Token;

You can re-use the same token in the constructor or several tasks:

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Summary of thread-safe collections in .NET

November 28, 2016 Leave a comment

The System.Collections.Concurrent namespace has 4 thread-safe collections that you can use in multi-threaded applications. The starting point is that you have a multi-threaded app where the same collection needs to be accessed by different threads. In that case the well-know collection types, like HashSet, List, Dictionary etc. simply won’t be enough.

If many different threads have access to the same resource then there’s no guarantee on the state of that resource in the moment a thread accesses it in some way: deletion, lookup, insertion or modification. Another thread may have accessed the same resource just milliseconds before that and the other thread will access the resource under the wrong assumptions. You’ll end up with buggy code with unpredictable results and ad-hoc fixes and patches that probably won’t solve the root of the problem.

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Using immutable collections for thread-safe read-only operations in .NET

October 3, 2016 Leave a comment

Sometimes you have a scenario where multiple threads need to read from the same shared collection. We’ve looked at the 4 concurrent, i.e. thread-safe collection types on this blog that are available in the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace. They can be safely used for both concurrent writes and reads.

However, if your threads strictly only need to read from a collection then there’s another option. There are collections in the System.Collections.Immutable namespace that are immutable, i.e. read-only and have been optimisied for concurrent read operations.

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A common platform for concurrent bags, stacks and queues in .NET

September 26, 2016 Leave a comment

We’ve looked at the available concurrent collections in .NET before:

3 of these objects implement the same interface. Can you guess which three are similar in some sense? Stacks, bags and queues differ from dictionaries in that elements in those collections cannot be retrieved by an index of any sort. You can take/pop/dequeue the elements one by one but you cannot get to element #3 without first removing all elements before that.

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Deferred execution in parallel LINQ in .NET C#

August 17, 2016 1 Comment

If you are familiar with LINQ then you are probably aware of the notion of deferred execution: queries are not carried out until they are needed. This is not different in parallel LINQ either. Let’s see an example:

Set up a data source:

int[] integerArray = new int[100];
for (int i = 0; i < integerArray.Length; i++)
{
	integerArray[i] = i;
}

Define a parallel query:

IEnumerable<double> results =
	integerArray.AsParallel().Select(item =>
	{
		return Math.Sqrt(item);
	});

The query has not been carried out at this point. It is carried out when the following foreach loop starts:

double sum = 0;
foreach (double result in results)
{
	sum += result;
}
Console.WriteLine("Total {0}", sum);

You can force query execution with the same extension methods as in “normal” LINQ, such as ToList, ToArray etc.:

IEnumerable<double> results =
	integerArray.AsParallel().Select(item =>
	{
		return Math.Sqrt(item);
	}).ToList();

In this case the query is executed as soon as it has been defined.

View the list of posts on the Task Parallel Library here.

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