Great news on the parallel front for VS 2010

I just saw Daniel Moth’s latest post on new features in Visual Studio 2010, and I got excited and decided that I had to share.

The .NET 4.0 base class libraries are adding in all of the very nice Parallel Extensions.  I’ve been using these since the first CTP, and am very anxious to get my hands on the released version.  In addition to all of the new changes to the Thread Pool in the next release of the CLR, the new parallel extensions provide some great benefits to scientific programming.

They make life very, very simple in terms of splitting out large processing of loops, and the parallelism seems to scale better than our own hand-rolled threading routines.

However, my main concern has always been the debugging experience – debugging parallel operations is difficult at best, and when you add the task library and what it does behind the scenes, things get even uglier.

It looks like Microsoft is getting it right with this one, though.  They are adding a new Parallel Tasks Debugger Window in VS 2010.  The current screenshots look like a very nice, clean interface for following task assignments, scheduling, and run time operation.  This should really take the Parallel Extensions to another level in terms of usability.