“When you begin using multi-threading throughout an application, the importance of clean architecture and design is critical. . . . This places an emphasis on understanding not only the platform’s capabilities but also emerging best practices. Joe does a great job interspersing best practices alongside theory throughout his book.” – From the Foreword by Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Microsoft Corporation   Author Joe Duffy has risen to the challenge of explaining how to write software that takes full advantage of concurrency and hardware parallelism. In Concurrent Programming on Windows, he explains how to design, implement, and maintain large-scale concurrent programs, primarily using C# and C++ for Windows.   Duffy aims to give application, system, and library developers the tools and techniques needed to write efficient, safe code for multicore processors. This is important not only for the kinds of problems where concurrency is inherent and easily exploitable—such as server applications, compute-intensive image manipulation, financial analysis, simulations, and AI algorithms—but also for problems that can be speeded up using parallelism but require more effort—such as math libraries, sort routines, report generation, XML manipulation, and stream processing algorithms.   Concurrent Programming on Windows has four major sections: The first introduces concurrency at a high level, followed by a section that focuses on the fundamental platform features, inner workings, and API details. Next, there is a section that describes common patterns, best practices, algorithms, and data structures that emerge while writing concurrent software. The final section covers many of the common system-wide architectural and process concerns of concurrent programming.   This is the only book you’ll need in order to learn the best practices and common patterns for programming with concurrency on Windows and .NET.

Table of Contents:
Foreword xix Preface xxiii Acknowledgments xxvii About the Author xxix   Part I: Concepts 1   Chapter 1: Introduction 3 Why Concurrency? 3 Program Architecture and Concurrency 6 Layers of Parallelism 8 Why Not Concurrency? 10 Where Are We? 11   Chapter 2: Synchronization and Time 13 Managing Program State 14 Synchronization: Kinds and Techniques 38 Where Are We? 73   Part II: Mechanisms 77   Chapter 3: Threads 79 Threading from 10,001 Feet 80 The Life and Death of Threads 89 Where Are We? 124   Chapter 4: Advanced Threads 127 Thread State 127 Inside Thread Creation and Termination 152 Thread Scheduling 154 Where Are We? 180   Chapter 5: Windows Kernel Synchronization 183 The Basics: Signaling and Waiting 184 Using the Kernel Objects 211 Where Are We? 251   Chapter 6: Data and Control Synchronization 253 Mutual Exclusion 255 Reader/Writer Locks (RWLs) 287 Condition Variables 304 Where Are We? 312   Chapter 7: Thread Pools 315 Thread Pools 101 316 Windows Thread Pools 323 CLR Thread Pool 364 Performance When Using the Thread Pools 391 Where Are We? 398   Chapter 8: Asynchronous Programming Models 399 Asynchronous Programming Model (APM) 400 Event-Based Asynchronous Pattern 421 Where Are We? 427   Chapter 9: Fibers 429 An Overview of Fibers 430 Using Fibers 435 Additional Fiber-Related Topics 445 Building a User-Mode Scheduler 453 Where Are We? 473   Part III: Techniques 475   Chapter 10: Memory Models and Lock Freedom 477 Memory Load and Store Reordering 478 Hardware Atomicity 486 Memory Consistency Models 506 Examples of Low-Lock Code 520 Where Are We? 541   Chapter 11: Concurrency Hazards 545 Correctness Hazards 546 Liveness Hazards 572 Where Are We? 609   Chapter 12: Parallel Containers 613 Fine-Grained Locking 616 Lock Free 632 Coordination Containers 640 Where Are We? 654   Chapter 13: Data and Task Parallelism 657 Data Parallelism 659 Task Parallelism 684 Message-Based Parallelism 719 Cross-Cutting Concerns 720 Where Are We? 732   Chapter 14: Performance and Scalability 735 Parallel Hardware Architecture 736 Speedup: Parallel vs. Sequential Code 756 Spin Waiting 767 Where Are We? 781   Part IV: Systems 783   Chapter 15: Input and Output 785 Overlapped I/O 786 I/O Cancellation 822 Where Are We? 826   Chapter 16: Graphical User Interfaces 829 GUI Threading Models 830 .NET Asynchronous GUI Features 837 Where Are We? 860   Part V: Appendices 863   Appendix A: Designing Reusable Libraries for Concurrent .NET Programs 865 The 20,000-Foot View 866 The Details 867   Appendix B: Parallel Extensions to .NET 887 Task Parallel Library 888 Parallel LINQ 910 Synchronization Primitives 915 Concurrent Collections 924   Index 931