Thursday, November 11, 2004

.NET Threading

Although my blog states I'd be covering some C# stuff, I haven't posted anything related to it. Time for that to change:)

I've been fighting with threading in a C# .NET application. Perhaps my frustration was related to the poor coverage of threading in pretty much any .NET book. Perhaps it was because MSDN doesn't really have a decent overview or "related links" in any of the threading-related topics. Another guess is that .NET is dissimilar to Java in its threading mechanism. Most likely, I have been spoiled by Win32's richness and capability when it came to threading.

I uncovered an excellent link to "Multi-threading in .NET" It is currently in 2nd place on a Google search for that term. I am using my limited "Google karma" to help pump that resource to #1 - the article is that good. Newbies to the .NET framework will not be overwhelmed, and moderately experienced .Net'ers will not be bored by it. It simply takes everything about threading and puts it into one place with some great examples. There is a slight C# bent to it. The article contains some .NET 2.0 items, and appears to be regularly updated. One thing I would change - it would be nice to have a "what's new" section for repeat visitors. Jon has plenty of other .NET related articles from his C# page. I haven't read anything else by him yet, but I'm assuming the quality bar is nearly the same.

Some favorite quotes: "...writing thread-safe code is all about taking luck out of the equation." Relating to changing Form or Control elements from a different thread than what they were created on: "You may get away with it in some cases, but only by blind luck."

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