I’ve written about asynchronous and parallel programming before, in the seven most common async mistakes and what SynchronizationContext is. Few topics in C# produce as many subtle bugs. Deadlocks only show up on the UI thread, exceptions disappear from async void methods, and race conditions never happen on your machine and happen every day in …
Asynchronous And Parallel Programming
Thread Affinity in .NET: When CPU Pinning Helps and How to Use TPL
Thread affinity means restricting a thread to run only on certain CPU cores. Without it, the operating system’s scheduler can move a thread from one core to another as it balances the load across the machine. The idea behind pinning a thread is cache locality: a thread that stays on one core keeps its working …
TPL Dataflow Blocks: Post vs SendAsync
I was reading an excellent series of articles about TPL Dataflow from Jack Vanlightly the other day. He draw my attention to the difference between Post and SendAsync when we want to post something to a block. I wasn’t thinking about it much at the time. But as I progressed through my readings, I saw …
More Robust Asynchrony and Parallelism With TPL Dataflow ActionBlock
.In my previous post, I explained what TPL Dataflow is and when we should and shouldn’t use it. But I haven’t got into much detail about how it can help us solve real world scenarios. Since my last post, thanks to a comment on my previous post, I went though different Stackoverflow questions. I saw …
What is TPL Dataflow in .Net and When Should We Use It
There are various ways to write a concurrent or parallel program in .Net but they’re often don’t have the flexibility and robustness needed. That’s where TPL Dataflow comes in, it helps us build a more robust concurrent program and it can helps us reduce a lot of complexity. For example when we use other paradigms …
Asynchronous Programming Series
Recently I wrote a series of posts regarding asynchronous programming. You can find the links to this series down below. In these series of posts I started from the definition of concurrency and how it’s different with parallelism. Then I moved on deeper into the subject by each post. My 10th post in this series …
Thread Safety
There a lot of things that can go wrong in our code. But when we introduce concurrency or parallelism in our code, we potentially could experience different set of bugs. These are race conditions, deadlocks and data corruption to name a few. This happens because there might be a share piece of data between different …
What Is SynchronizationContext
SynchronizationContext is one of those topics that deserves a better understanding if we want to fully know how asynchorony works in .Net. It’s true that most of these concerns handled behind the scene. But we can benefit by understanding what exactly happens when we offload a task to a worker thread or release the thread …
Exception Handling In Asynchronous Code
It is important to know how exceptions are handled in an asynchronous program. Partly because these subtle points can sometime become a headache. When exception are thrown in a code that runs inside a task, all the exceptions are placed on the task object and returned to the calling thread. When exceptions happen, all the …
Task.Run Vs TaskCompletionSource Vs Task.Factory.FromAsync
There’s a lot of small intricate details that one can miss when we deal asynchronous programs. Even though these days far more superior APIs exist that make things a lot easier. For example a lot of people think if we want to call any synchronous code asynchronously, we just simply wrap it in Task.Run. It’s …