Codeguru Update eNewsletter – November 4th, 2008

CodeGuru content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

Tuesday November 4, 2008

This Week’s Topics

• Comments from the Editor
  
• Recently Published Books
  
• New & Updated Articles on CodeGuru
  
  
  
  
  • New Features in Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0
    
  • .NET Tip: It’s 2:00 a.m. Do You Know What Your Processes Are
    Doing?
    
  • Parallel Programming in Visual C++ 2010 CTP
    
  • Notes from Microsoft PDC 2008
    
  • Speed Up Your Reflection Processes
  
  
• Hottest Discussions
  
• New Articles on Developer.com
  
  
  
  
  • Multimedia Programming with Java: Getting Started
    
  • Reduce String Literal Overhead with Eclipse
    
  • Continuously Improving Your Kanban Change Request Process
    

Comments from the Editor

Today is a great day to be an American. We
get to vote for our next president. Not only that, regardless of the
outcome (assuming one of the two major parties’ candidates will win), the
vote will be historic.

Also historic for this week is an upgrade to the discussion forum on
Codeguru. If all goes as planned, the discussion forum software will be
upgraded on Wednesday evening. There won’t be any major changes that
you’ll notice; however, the software will have better security and will
allow us to use a few AJAX features.

In this newsletter, I post hot threads that
are happening in the discussion forum on Codeguru. One hot
thread this week is on multi-core processors. This is an area I’ve
been focused on for a couple of years now due to the impact these
processors will make. It is interesting to see some of the
misunderstandings around multi-core systems.

In the hot thread on the site, such a misunderstanding started the
conversation. That misunderstanding centered on the issue of a computer
only using half its power to run a program. It wasn’t using the full
power. This was a direct result of a program running on just a single core
of a dual-core program. The result is that the one core was fully
utilized, but the other was not. This resulted in 100% use of the core,
but only 50% usage of the entire processor. As noted in the thread, if
this were a quad-core system, only 25% of the processor’s power would have
been used.

As a developer, you have to be aware of the impact of multi-cores on
your programs. There is a paradigm shift you need to be aware of when
architecting your programs. Microsoft, Intel, and others have tools to
make coding your applications to multi-core systems easier, but it is
still up to you to determine what parts of an application can be
architected to run concurrently or in parallel. A processor’s logic or API
will not be able to figure that out on its own.

In many cases, threading has been used in the past to break an
application into pieces so it could run concurrently or in parallel. It is
interesting to note that with the tools that are coming, you should not be
thinking in terms of threads, but rather in terms of
tasks. You will want to architect your programs with tasks in
mind. A task would be a piece of logic that can run at the same time as
others. Thus, you can identify a task that can be parallelized or run
concurrently. Then, you also can identify contingencies that these tasks
might have.

Bottom line, multi-core processors are changing the way we architect
many of our applications. Today, you need to consciously think about what
the impacts are and plan them into your applications. The tools are
already getting better at making this easier, but there is still a ways to
go before thinking about multi-core falls to the wayside in the same way
that thinking about memory did in the early 90s.

We are at a point where a historic change in how programs are
architected is about to happen. Parallelism and concurrency are part of
the new frontier. That future looks bright for gaining power in our
applications. Let’s hope the historic changes happening in America with
the election today also lead to a bright future!

Until next week…

Brad!
—————————
Bradley L. Jones