Available parallel technologies in .Net

Question

I am new to .Net platform. I did a search and found that there are several ways to do parallel computing in .Net:

1. Parallel task in Task Parallel Library, which

Answer 1

There is also the Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx)

Rx is basically linq queries for events. It allows you to process and combine asynchronous data streams in the same way linq allows you to work with collections. So you would probably use it in conjunction with other parallel technologies as a way of bringing the results of your parallel operations together without having to worry about locks and other low level threading primitives.

Expert to Expert: Brian Beckman and Erik Meijer - Inside the .NET Reactive Framework (Rx) gives a good overview of what Rx is all about.

EDIT: Another library worth mention is the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR), it's been around for a long time (earlier than '06) and is shipped as part of the Microsoft Robotics Studio.

Rx has a lot of the same cool ideas that the CCR has inside it, but with a much nicer API in my opinion. There's still some interesting stuff in the CCR though so it might be worth checking out. There's also a distributed services framework that works with the CCR that might make it useful depending on what you're doing.

Expert to Expert: Meijer and Chrysanthakopoulos - Concurrency, Coordination and the CCR