GoingDeep: Programming in the Age of Concurrency - Anders Hejlsberg and Joe Duffy: Concurrent Programming with

Microsoft is developing a number of technologies to simplify the expression of parallelism in code. An example of this work is Parallel Extensions for the .NET Framework (PFX), a managed programming model for data parallelism, task parallelism, scheduling, and coordination on parallel hardware.

PFX makes it easier for developers to write programs that take advantage of parallel hardware (you've all heard of multi-core and what the future holds with many-core...), without having to deal with the complexities of threads and locks in today’s concurrent programming story. Of course, PFX is not a concurrent programming silver bullet. There is still a great deal of work left to do in the imperative programming world's approach to concurrency. PFX is an excellent start with a syntax that .NET developers can relate to and understand.

Here, Joe Duffy, Senior Software Engineer, and Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg sit down with me to discuss the basics and some of the details of the managed PFX library's architecture and implementation, whiteboard included.

For more information on specific technologies, check out the PLINQ and TPL articles in the October 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine.


High res video download file here.