Tasks and the Task Parallel Library (TPL) will soon be entering the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) vernacular. WCF 4.5 will include Task based options, however, a WCF developer needn't wait for .NET 4.5 to leverage TPL. Jeffrey Juday shows you how to build a TPL Task based WCF Service with WCF 4.0.

Jeffrey Juday shows you how to bring Task Parallel Library (TPL) and Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) together to manage a workload on the .NET platform.

To fully exploit Open Data Protocol (OData) with WCF Data Services there are classes and interfaces a .NET app must instantiate or implement. Using a sample WCF Data Services application, this article explains how to implement data creation on an OData Endpoint.

Understanding OData conventions are important to building an OData client and testing an OData Endpoint. Of all the OData conventions the most important convention a WCF Data Services developer must understand are the OData URI conventions. This article explains how OData URI conventions map to code living inside of WCF Data Services.

OData's simplicity and common underlying Web standards have made it a popular Data protocol in the Microsoft stack. WCF Data Services includes several Providers that surface OData from .NET classes.

Often blocking and checking is combined with some sort of timeout. SpinUntil, a static method on the SpinWait structure, combines blocking, waiting, and timeouts. New in the .NET Framework 4.0, SpinUntil simplifies many different scenarios involving the Task Parallel Library (TPL). Jeffery Juday shares some common recipes employing SpinUntil alongside TPL.

A substantial number of Task Parallel Library (TPL) Concurrent collections implement IProducerConsumerCollection. Jeffrey Juday explains the scenarios and mechanisms around implementing IProducerConsumerCollections.

Microsoft's recent Windows 8 announcement makes HTML5 and anything HTML5/JavaScript related an important subject for any Windows developer. To most developers HTML is a "tag" based user-interface specification. However, HTML5 is more than just new "tags". Yoked to, but separate from the HTML5 specification is a specification defining background running scripts called Web Workers.

Learn how to build Task Parallel Library Continuation with multiple Antecedents.

Developers typically choose a Timer to have an application perform a concurrent background process after some elapsed interval. Wouldn't it be nice to couple results and Timer control in a single class? Task Parallel Library (TPL) includes a class called TaskCompletionSource that enables this scenario.

Much of the .NET Task Parallel Library (TPL) Data Parallel functionality is encapsulated in Parallel Loops. Unlike a regular loop, Parallel loops must partition a collection, requiring a developer to address concurrency issues like cancellation and thread safe operations. This article introduces the TPL Data Parallel core classes and concepts.

Data Parallelism and Task Parallelism are common Parallel Computing forms. Task Parallel Library (TPL) bears the "Task Parallel" name, but where does Data Parallel fit into TPL? How is Data Parallel done in the Task Parallel Library? What does Data Parallel look like in the Task Parallel Library? Read on for the answer to these questions.

Even though WF was not built on TPL, there are TPL features that can make running WF workflows easier. In self-hosted scenarios, for example, a desktop application may be running a workflow. Code examples in this article demonstrate how TPL and WF can work together.

The original release of the .NET Framework included collections as .NET was introduced to the Microsoft programming world. The .NET Framework 2.0 introduced generics to complement the System.Collections namespace and provide a more efficient and well performing option. Read on to learn more...

Learn how to handle Active Object method return values with .NET Framework Tasks.

Task Parallel Library contains all the plumbing a developer will need to implement the Active Object pattern.

The .NET runtime has everything you need to format your output and handle special characters. Both Visual Basic 2010 Express edition and Visual Studio 2010 help you with Intellisense if you can't remember the syntax. This article explores simple console input and output and shows you how to get it done.

Hardly noticeable, yet critical to a smoothly executing Parallel workload. TaskSchedulers are the "conductors" of the Task Parallel Library world.

Understanding data and how it is represented is key to making use of it in a program. This article walks thru VB.NETbs standard data types and talks about how to make use of them.

Like all .NET technologies there are many approaches to combining Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Task Parallel Library (TPL) within the .NET Framework. Using some code samples I'm going to demonstrate how to incorporate TPL into WPF.

TPL includes Cancellations and AggregateExceptions for interrupting work and dealing with collections of exceptions often generated when multiple Tasks are interrupted. There are patterns to implementing Cancellations and this article demonstrates some of the more common patterns.

VB.NET provides a solid set of programming tools to implement flow control. VB.NET 2010 includes the For Each construct, making it possible to easily iterate over a list of items with little to no extra coding. This article examines the different VB.NET keywords and gives examples of how they're used.

In making parallel computing more accessible, Microsoft has also made asynchronous execution more accessible. Nowhere is this fact more apparent than in technologies built from the ground up on these new asynchronous capabilities. Take, for example, Reactive Extensions (Rx); a set of libraries built on LINQ and the Task Parallel Library (TPL).

The Transactional File System (TxF), which allows access to an NTFS file system to be conducted in a transacted manner through extensions to the Windows SDK API. MFC 10, has been extended to support TxF and related technologies. This support allows existing MFC applications to be easily extended to support kernel transactions.

There is a buffet of Parallel Programming patterns and conventions documentation. A good approach to digesting all the available information is to ingest a little bit at a time. Developers looking for a Parallel Programming Patterns and Conventions appetizer will find it in this article.

Learn about the Task Parallel Library Dataflow, a new member of Microsoft's Technical Computing Initiative built on the Task Parallel Library.

Discover how to start and control a third party GUI application, particularly the Notepad text editor, from your own C++ applications.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is a great integrated development environment for turning out top quality .NET framework applications. VB 2010 Express provides the same basic tools without some of the high-end team development pieces. This first of a two-part article will introduce the user to the VB 2010 Express product.

During the glory days of MFC and ATL in the 1990s and early 2000s, The Visual C++ class wizard was a highly-used and useful IDE tool that simplified life for developers. The re-introduction of the class wizard, after the absence of a decade, demonstrates commitment to the 'glory day's' ideal and adds simplicity to class management tasks inside the IDE.

Task Continuations allows developers to create interdependencies between tasks. The interdependencies can involve simple execution in response to task completion or aggregated exception handling among tasks. Read along to learn more.

See how you can use the .NET framework to create your own wrapper classes in C# programming to help boost your application performance when accessing a bunch of reference or other look-up type data that you frequently use.

For every true C++ developer, the Standard C++ Library is the first choice for utility classes, collections and algorithms to streamline the development effort. Continuing on from the investment in core C++ programming improvements in Visual C++ 2008, Visual C++ 2010 introduces improvements in the Standard C++ Library related to C++ 0x, and this article focuses on advancements in Standard C++ collections and algorithms.

Is some of your business logic in code and some in SQL Server? Then, just call the SQL from the .NET framework and the .NET framework from SQL with CLR integration. Here are all the steps you need to get started.

Learn how .NET Framework 4.0 Parallel Computing will enable an upcoming C# programming feature and make asynchronous coding easier.

Explore how to use the .NET Framework to respond to the operating system notifications that a new file has been created in a particular directory. Use FTP to upload the file to an FTP site of your choosing and then move the file to an alternate location.

In this age of cloud computing, massive parallel systems and complex security threats like identity theft and decentralized botnets, devoting resources to combat the seemingly age-old issue of integer overflow appears distinctly passC). Despite the fact that integer overflow is such a well know problem, particularly within C and C++ programming, the problem remains a real issue from both a defect and security standpoint, that's why the introduction of the SafeInt template class in Visual C++ 2010 to address overflows is a great addition.

Explore how to use classes in the .NET Framework to upload images in to your web applications, create consistently sized versions, thumb nails for preview, and then store them for retrieval and use.

Application manifest files provide a declarative means for an application to detail its dependencies and runtime requirements. Each version of Windows and Visual C++ adds further options that can be specified in the application manifest file, and it is important for correct application deployment and execution that the Visual C++ developer keeps up to date with these advances.

Memory mapped files use the system's memory manager and lets you treat large files as if they were in-memory objects, supporting extremely large file access, faster access, and multiple, simultaneous processes accessing the same file.

Learn how BlockingCollection, a new .NET Framework 4.0 concurrency friendly data structure, can serve as a mediator between task classes sharing data.

Learn the practice of using projections in your LINQ statements to ensure you are not over retrieving data values from your Entity Framework model.

A number of factors are driving the requirement for applications to correctly support high DPI settings--increased monitor resolutions are making it more difficult for users to read text on the screen, compliance with disability access legislation is an increasingly important factor for corporations, and users are now expecting applications to behave well at higher DPI settings. MFC 10 and Visual C++ 2010 have built-in support for high DPI, making the development of a DPI-aware application quicker and more simple.

Learn how to enumerate the files and folders on a computer with LINQ, managing access exceptions along the way.

Encryption and keeping secrets depends on large prime numbers that are too big to crack by brute force. .NET framework 4.0 introduces the BigInteger that has no theoretical upper and lower bounds.

Learn how to configure the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Routing Service for common service scenarios.

Learn how to use table-valued parameters, introduced in SQL Server 2008, to boost the performance and scalability of your .NET framework applications. You'll also see an example of how to create and use the user-defined type.

The introduction of the iPad and other slates demonstrates that end users have a strong appetite for touch-enabled experiences. MFC 10 adds comprehensive support for touch functionality, allowing users with tablet PCs and digitizers to interact with applications in a simple, natural manner, including gestures and multi-touch.

Microsoft Visual Studio has extensive support for setting breakpoints with extra conditions, including code, and then searching for and managing those breakpoints. Read more to see how to put beakpoints to work for you.

Learn how to design custom PowerShell CmdLets and providers that leverage the PowerShell pipeline.

The Office 2007 suite of applications introduced the Ribbon UI element to combine and simplify application toolbars and menus into a single, consistent area for invoking task-specific application commands. Windows 7 ships with a Ribbon control, and Visual C++ developers have easy access to this built-in Ribbon functionality through MFC 10 enhancements.