Multithreading with C# Cookbook

264 Pages·2016·2.05 MB·English

by  Eugene Agafonov

Multithreading with
C# Cookbook
Second Edition
Over 70 recipes to get you writing powerful
and efficient multithreaded, asynchronous,
and parallel programs in C# 6.0
Eugene Agafonov
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Multithreading with C# Cookbook
Second Edition
Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing
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First published: November 2013
Second Edition: April 2016
Production reference: 1150416
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78588-125-1
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Credits
Author Copy Editor
Eugene Agafonov Neha Vyas
Reviewers Project Coordinator
Chad McCallum Francina Pinto
Philip Pierce
Proofreader
Commissioning Editor Safis Editing
Edward Gordon
Indexer
Acquisition Editor Rekha Nair
Kirk D'Costa
Production Coordinator
Content Development Editor Manu Joseph
Nikhil Borkar
Cover Work
Technical Editor Manu Joseph
Vivek Pala
About the Author
Eugene Agafonov leads the development department at ABBYY and lives in Moscow.
He has over 15 years of professional experience in software development, and he started
working with C# when it was in beta version. He is a Microsoft MVP in ASP.NET since 2006,
and he often speaks at local software development conferences, such as DevCon Russia,
about cutting-edge technologies in modern web and server-side application development. His
main professional interests are cloud-based software architecture, scalability, and reliability.
Eugene is a huge fan of football and plays the guitar with a local rock band. You can reach him
at his personal blog, eugeneagafonov.com, or find him on Twitter at @eugene_agafonov.
ABBYY is a global leader in the development of document recognition, content capture, and
language-based technologies and solutions that are integrated across the entire information
life cycle.
He is the author of Multhreading in C# 5.0 Cookbook and Mastering C# Concurrency
by Packt Publishing.
I'd like to dedicate this book to my dearly beloved wife, Helen, and son,
Nikita.
About the Reviewers
Chad McCallum is a Saskatchewan computer geek with a passion for software
development. He has over 10 years of .NET experience (and 2 years of PHP, but we won't
talk about that). After graduating from SIAST Kelsey Campus, he picked up freelance PHP
contracting work until he could pester iQmetrix to give him a job, which he's hung onto for
the last 10 years. He's come back to his roots in Regina and started HackREGINA, a local
hackathon organization aimed at strengthening the developer community while coding and
drinking beer. His current focus is mastering the art of multitenant e-commerce with .NET.
Between his obsession with board gaming and random app ideas, he tries to learn a new
technology every week. You can see the results at www.rtigger.com.
Philip Pierce is a software developer with 20 years of experience in mobile, web, desktop,
and server development, database design and management, and game development. His
background includes creating A.I. for games and business software, converting AAA games
between various platforms, developing multithreaded applications, and creating patented
client/server communication technologies.
Philip has won several hackathons, including Best Mobile App at the AT&T Developer
Summit 2013, and a runner up for Best Windows 8 App at PayPal's Battlethon Miami.
His most recent project was converting Rail Rush and Temple Run 2 from the Android
platform to Arcade platforms.
Philip's portfolios can be found at the following websites:
f http://www.rocketgamesmobile.com
f http://www.philippiercedeveloper.com
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Table of Contents
Preface v
Chapter 1: Threading Basics 1
Introduction 2
Creating a thread in C# 2
Pausing a thread 6
Making a thread wait 7
Aborting a thread 8
Determining a thread state 10
Thread priority 12
Foreground and background threads 14
Passing parameters to a thread 16
Locking with a C# lock keyword 19
Locking with a Monitor construct 22
Handling exceptions 24
Chapter 2: Thread Synchronization 27
Introduction 27
Performing basic atomic operations 28
Using the Mutex construct 31
Using the SemaphoreSlim construct 32
Using the AutoResetEvent construct 34
Using the ManualResetEventSlim construct 36
Using the CountDownEvent construct 38
Using the Barrier construct 39
Using the ReaderWriterLockSlim construct 41
Using the SpinWait construct 44
i
Table of Contents
Chapter 3: Using a Thread Pool 47
Introduction 47
Invoking a delegate on a thread pool 49
Posting an asynchronous operation on a thread pool 52
A thread pool and the degree of parallelism 54
Implementing a cancellation option 56
Using a wait handle and timeout with a thread pool 59
Using a timer 61
Using the BackgroundWorker component 63
Chapter 4: Using the Task Parallel Library 67
Introduction 67
Creating a task 69
Performing basic operations with a task 70
Combining tasks 72
Converting the APM pattern to tasks 75
Converting the EAP pattern to tasks 79
Implementing a cancelation option 81
Handling exceptions in tasks 83
Running tasks in parallel 85
Tweaking the execution of tasks with TaskScheduler 87
Chapter 5: Using C# 6.0 93
Introduction 93
Using the await operator to get asynchronous task results 96
Using the await operator in a lambda expression 98
Using the await operator with consequent asynchronous tasks 100
Using the await operator for the execution of parallel asynchronous tasks 102
Handling exceptions in asynchronous operations 104
Avoiding the use of the captured synchronization context 107
Working around the async void method 111
Designing a custom awaitable type 114
Using the dynamic type with await 118
Chapter 6: Using Concurrent Collections 123
Introduction 123
Using ConcurrentDictionary 125
Implementing asynchronous processing using ConcurrentQueue 127
Changing asynchronous processing order with ConcurrentStack 130
Creating a scalable crawler with ConcurrentBag 132
Generalizing asynchronous processing with BlockingCollection 136
ii
Table of Contents
Chapter 7: Using PLINQ 141
Introduction 141
Using the Parallel class 143
Parallelizing a LINQ query 145
Tweaking the parameters of a PLINQ query 148
Handling exceptions in a PLINQ query 151
Managing data partitioning in a PLINQ query 153
Creating a custom aggregator for a PLINQ query 157
Chapter 8: Reactive Extensions 161
Introduction 161
Converting a collection to an asynchronous Observable 162
Writing custom Observable 165
Using the Subjects type 168
Creating an Observable object 172
Using LINQ queries against an observable collection 174
Creating asynchronous operations with Rx 177
Chapter 9: Using Asynchronous I/O 181
Introduction 181
Working with files asynchronously 183
Writing an asynchronous HTTP server and client 187
Working with a database asynchronously 190
Calling a WCF service asynchronously 194
Chapter 10: Parallel Programming Patterns 199
Introduction 199
Implementing Lazy-evaluated shared states 200
Implementing Parallel Pipeline with BlockingCollection 205
Implementing Parallel Pipeline with TPL DataFlow 210
Implementing Map/Reduce with PLINQ 215
Chapter 11: There's More 221
Introduction 221
Using a timer in a Universal Windows Platform application 223
Using WinRT from usual applications 227
Using BackgroundTask in Universal Windows Platform applications 230
Running a .NET Core application on OS X 237
Running a .NET Core application on Ubuntu Linux 240
Index 243
iii