Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0 Beta 1 Finally Arrived

Posted by Gaston Hillar @ 04:31:PM | May 18, 2009

After a long silence since the last CTP (Community Technology Preview), Microsoft released the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 that comes with the new .Net Framework 4.0. This new release will bring new promising features that empower parallel programming using the supported languages.

I must say that the Visual Studio 2010 CTP was not very useful to test the new multi-core performance improvements. It was available as a Virtual PC image and it expired on January 1 2009 (a few months ago).

In the meantime, there were many interesting changes in the Task Parallel Library, now included as part of .Net Framework 4.0. However, it was difficult to test their performance because Virtual PC 2007 was limited to using a single core. Testing multi-core programming in a single core virtual machine was not really useful. This first beta version will bring us the truth about the performance improvements.

I'm especially interested in the improved garbage collector and the last changes in the Parallel Extensions. The new features offered by .Net 4.0 are very promising and it is very important to begin measuring the performance that can be achieved with the new ThreadPool and the new task-based approach.

The new debugger will simplify the debugging process for multi-core development. Besides, a multi-monitor support in the IDE makes things easier when you have to work with more than eight threads and watch them. As a Core i7 with Hyper-Threading offers 8 logical cores, it is very probable to work with applications with more than 8 threads with Visual Studio 2010.

The new features are promising for parallel programming. However, this is the first Beta release. Now, it's time to test the performance and to check the changes in the Task Parallel Library and in the Concurrency and Coordination Run-time.

MSDN subscribers can download Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0 Beta 1 today (May 18th). Non-subscribers will have to wait for May 20th, just two days.

If you are an MSDN subscriber, you can log-in and download.

If you aren't an MSDN subscriber, check Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0 Web page and wait until Wednesday.

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Real World Parallelism Webinar Series

  • November 17, 2009
    Visual Effects for Animation - presented by DreamWorks Animation
    Speaker: Ron Henderson (Bio)

    Ron Henderson manages the FX Tools group at DreamWorks Animation, where he is responsible for developing physical simulation and procedural modeling tools. These systems have been used for key visual effects in recent films such as Kung Fu Panda and Monsters vs. Aliens (March 2009).

    Prior to joining DreamWorks in 2002 he was a senior scientist at Caltech with a joint appointment to the Applied Math and Aeronautics departments, where he worked on efficient techniques for the direct numerical simulation of fluid turbulence.

    Abstract:
    In this webinar, Ron Henderson will show examples of visual effects, from hair and feathers to smoke and fire, from a variety of DreamWorks Animation feature films. He will discuss in general terms the kinds of techniques used to achieve particular visual effects. Finally, Henderson will show a detailed breakdown of the dam-breaking scene from Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, demonstrating how different elements of key frame animation, simulation, and rendering are combined in a real production shot.

  • December 1, 2009
    A Quick and Easy Way to Parallelize a Legacy Codebase with Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBBs)
    Speaker: Bernard Laberge, Avid, Senior Principal Engineer (Bio)

    Bernard Laberge is a senior principal engineer in the video editors division at Avid. During his seven years with the company he has been actively involved in the replacement of the legacy video processing engines used by Avid editors with a common hardware-abstracted, component-based video processing engine currently running on the CPU with SIMD optimized code, GPU, and dedicated hardware.

    Abstract:
    Learn how to overcome the limitations of a thread-based scheduler, including dealing with the absence of recursive parallelism support and the inefficient handling of unbalanced processing load. Bernard Laberge addresses how Avid resolved the expensive refactoring of their thread-based scheduler into a task-based solution by choosing Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBBs). He explores how Avid was able to easily integrate the Intel TBBs into their video editor applications and more than 5 million lines of code.

  • December 15, 2009
    How to Use Intel® Parallel Studio to Streamline Code Development in a Multicore Environment
    Speaker: Matt Dunbar, Director for Performance Technology, SIMULIA (Bio)

    Matt Dunbar is the director for performance technology at SIMULIA. Since joining the company in 1993, he has worked on parallelization of the Abaqus suite of products, initially for shared memory architectures and more recently for distributed memory architectures. Dunbar has also been intimately involved in selecting both the hardware and software tools used in the development of the Abaqus product line.

    Abstract:
    Resolve elusive, costly multithreading errors quickly and efficiently with Intel® Parallel Studio. While many coding problems that lead to bugs in software applications are typically straightforward logic errors, errors in managing memory and in multithreading code can sometimes take weeks to months to diagnose and fix. Matt Dunbar explores how and why taking advantage of multicore processors through multithreaded code is critical for compute-intensive applications. While spotlighting his work on SIMULIA's Abaqus finite element solver, Dunbar addresses the need for multicore execution and shares his experiences using Intel Parallel Studio to streamline code development in a multicore environment.