Photos: Microsoft's new parallel programming toolkit 
Published: 11 Nov 2008 10:11 GMT
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At PDC 2008 Microsoft launched its Concurrency and Coordination Runtime and Decentralized Software Services Toolkit 2008(CCR & DSS 2008), which is in part a by-product of work for the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008.
This could be one of the most important announcements Microsoft has made in the parallel programming area. Like the other great hope of parallel programming enthusiasts, Erlang, Microsoft has created a toolkit that uses lightweight threading and message passing to create a new programming model for today's multi-core processors.
The CCR looks straightforward to use and provides a great programming model for concurrency, using the C# yield keyword to great effect to create a continuations-based programming model. Locks are not used: instead, the model is that code doesn't run until all its data dependencies are fulfilled. There is a visual designer (VPL) where the dataflow between services can be modelled; this then generates C# code, which it's claimed is human-readable rather the usual machine-generated spaghetti. The VPL diagram above shows a simple counting service that counts to ten, putting text into an output queue.
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