[2008.07.01] Parallel Extensions: Coordinate Data Structures Overview

• the June 2008 CTP introduces a set of coordination data structures (CDS) that complement PLINQ and the Task Parallel Library
• the System.Threading namespace of the .NET Framework 3.5 already contains a handful of synchronization primitives, such as Events, Monitor, ManualResetEvent, Mutex and Semaphore.
• these types are still very useful for developing multithreading applications, and in fact Parallel Extensions relies on many of them, but sometimes higher-level or lighter-weight primitives are required to facilitate communications between threads
• many parallel applications, however, would benefit greatly from higher-level or lighter-weight constructs are required to facilitate communications between threads such as thread-safe collections, more sophisticated locking primitives, data structures to facilitate work exchange, and types that control how variables are initialized
• Parallel Extensions adds several such constructs to the namespaces of System.Threading and System.Threading.Collections
• these new structures are as follows:

CDS in System.Threading

System.Threading.SpinWait System.Threading.SpinLock System.Threading.ManualResetEventSlim System.Threading.SemaphoreSlim System.Threading.CountdownEventm System.Threading.LazyInit System.Threading.WriteOnce

CDS in System.Threading.Collections

System.Threading.BlockingCollection System.Threading.ConcurrentQueue System.Threading.ConcurrentStack