Tag Archives: multi-threading

Book review : “MCSD Certification Toolkit (Exam 70-483): Programming in C#”

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Introduction

I’ve recently passed the Microsoft 70-483 “Programming in C#” certification which is one of the entry point into the .Net and WinRT developers certification cycles.
To be well prepared I’ve read the two books entirely dedicated to this certification : MCSD Certification Toolkit (Exam 70-483): Programming in C# and Exam Ref 70-483: Programming in C#.
I strongly recommend you read both of them if you intend to pass the certification.
Indeed both have been my main material to prepare for the certification and they have perfectly done the job.

This article is a complete review of MCSD Certification Toolkit (Exam 70-483): Programming in C#.
This is the first book you should read because I think this is the one that will best prepare you to get the certification, but paradoxically the worst from a technical point of view, and you will quickly understand why.

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Relative performance of ReaderWriterLockSlim

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Introduction

I’ve recently wanted to demonstrate the relevance of the .Net ReaderWriterLock[Slim] synchronization primitives.
It’s good to hear from the vendor that it’s better, faster, stronger, but when you can it’s always good to evaluate it yourself; not that I don’t trust vendors, but because I like to have hard numbers, particularly when I assert something that can be critical for my participants’ developments.

So I’ve built a small, simple and I hope relevant benchmark to measure the performance impact of ReaderWriterLock[Slim] compared to the naive and uniform use of a Monitor using the C# lock construct.

I wanted to check these two things:

  • that the RW locks behave as advertised,
  • what is the profile of the gain function.

In this article I’ll explain the rationales behind the benchmark, how I’ve implemented it and finally present the results.

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Synchronization, memory visibility and leaky abstractions

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Introduction

First a warning, this is a difficult article which goes really deep inside the .Net machinery so if you don’t get it the first time (or even the second or third time…) don’t worry and come back later. 🙂

For a training session I’ve taught at the end of last year I wanted to demonstrate some subtleties of multi-threading, and more specifically some memory visibility issues that should cause a program to hang.
So I developed a small sample that I expected would be showing the issue, but instead of hanging as expected the program completed!

After manipulating the program further I obtained the behavior I wanted, the program was hanging, but it still didn’t explained why it managed to complete with my original version.

<SPOILER>
I suspected some JITter optimizations, and indeed it was the case, but I needed more information to completely explain this strange behavior.
As often, the StackOverflow platform was of great help; if you’re curious you can have a look at the original SO thread.
</SPOILER>

In this article I’ll “build” and explain the issue step by step, trying to make it more understandable than the SO thread which is indeed quite dry.

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