Chapter 2: Evolution of Multithreaded Programming in .NET

As .NET and C# have evolved over the last 20 years, new and innovative approaches to multithreaded programming have been introduced. C# has added new language features to support asynchronous programming, and .NET Framework and .NET Core have added new types to support the languages. The most impactful improvements were introduced with C# 5 and .NET Framework 4.0 when Microsoft added the Task Parallel Library (TPL), thread-safe collections, and the async and await keywords.

This chapter will introduce concepts and features that will be explored in greater depth in subsequent chapters. These concepts include the .NET thread pool, asynchronous programming with async and await, concurrent collections, and parallelism. We will start by discovering when and why threading features were added to .NET and C#. Then, we will create some practical examples of how to use the new concepts. Finally, we will wrap up the chapter by discussing...