.NET threading through the years

Working with threads in .NET and C# has undergone much evolution since .NET Framework 1.0 and C# 1.0 were introduced in 2002. Most of the concepts discussed in Chapter 1, regarding the System.Threading.Thread objects have been available since those early days of .NET. While the Thread object is still available in .NET 6 and can be useful for simple scenarios, there are more elegant and modern solutions that are available today.

This section will highlight when the most impactful parallelism and concurrency features were added. We will begin by skipping ahead 8 years to 2010.

C# 4 and .NET Framework 4.0

In 2010, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 alongside C# 4 and .NET Framework 4.0. While some earlier language and framework features such as generics, lambda expressions, and anonymous methods would help facilitate later threading features, these 2010 releases were the most significant for threading since 2002. .NET Framework included the...