Introduction to parallelism

While exploring the history of threading in C# and .NET, we learned that parallelism was introduced to developers in .NET Framework 4.0. In this section, the aspects that will be explored are exposed in the TPL through the System.Threading.Tasks.Parallel class. In addition, we will cover some of the basics of PLINQ through examples. These data parallelism concepts will be covered in greater detail with real-world examples in Chapter 6, Chapter 7, and Chapter 8.

At a high level, parallelism is the concept of executing multiple tasks in parallel. These tasks could be related to one another, but this is not a requirement. In fact, related tasks running in parallel run a greater risk of encountering synchronization issues or blocking one another. For example, if your application loads order data from an orders service and user preferences and application state from an Azure blob store, these two processes can be run in parallel without having to worry about...