Parallelism in VS2010 at Illinois next week...

Sat, June 20, 2009, 06:52 AM under Events
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is holding what seems like a fantastic week-long summer course on multi-core programming. They have invited me to give a session (or what they term on that page a "special lecture") on Parallel Programming in Visual Studio 2010! All I have to do this weekend is prepare that lecture :-)

On a personal note, I've never been to that part of the USA, so I'll spend a couple days in Chicago finding out if all the rumors (good and bad) are true…

Parallel Stacks and Parallel Tasks screencasts

Wed, June 17, 2009, 04:52 PM under ParallelComputing
Whether you have read or not my blog posts on the new Visual Studio 2010 debugger windows, you now have the option of seeing them in action in these videos I published on channel9: 17-minute screencast on Parallel Stacks and 14-minute screencast on Parallel Tasks.

If you don't like watching videos and you don't like reading about features, maybe you prefer the guided hands on approach. Launch your VS2010 instance and go through my walkthrough published on MSDN.

Parallel Stacks – Method View

Sat, June 6, 2009, 03:24 PM under ParallelComputing
This post was UPDATED for the VS2010 Beta 2 release

The new Parallel Stacks window has a special feature (that applies to both Threads View and Tasks View) that we call Method View. It is accessible from the toolbar and it acts on the current stack frame (i.e. the only one with a green arrow icon or, in the absence of that, the one with the yellow arrow). It takes that method and pivots the diagram on it, coalescing all occurrences of that method into a single node in the center, clearly showing the callees and the callers. Threads that do not have that method on their stack are filtered out and not shown. Check out the before and after screenshots:

Switching to another stack frame in Method View will result in that method context becoming the "center of attention", and hence potentially some threads will disappear and others will re-appear on the diagram. The view persists cross debugging sessions (just like all the other options) and to get out of it you simply need to click on the Method View toolbar button again and return to Stack View.