What .NET 4.5 (or earlier) higher-level constructs make Threading easier?

Question

Delegates are a few of the objects that make threading easier in .NET reference. They can be used to asynchronously invoke a method. What other objects exist in framework 4.5 (o

Answer 1

Well let's see here:

1. The ThreadPool class - kinda old, but still reliable for a simple producer-consumer pattern.
2. BackgoundWorker (.NET 2.0+) - another old-school construct, providing useful features for executing tasks in the background in GUI applications.
3. Timers - useful for executing code at specified intervals using a background thread.
4. The Task class (.NET 4.0+) - threading abstractions that run on the underlying thread pool and provide many useful features like exception marshaling and scheduling. Useful for the so-called "task parallelism" pattern.
5. Parallel.For, Parallel.ForEach (.NET 4.0+) - good for executing the same operation over a set of data in parallel. Useful for the so-called "data parallelism" pattern.
6. Parallel.Invoke (.NET 4.0+) - a further abstraction over Tasks. Simply fires off several pieces of code (methods, lambdas) in parallel.
7. Concurrent collections (.NET 4.0+) - all you need to pass or share data between threads in an efficient and thread-safe manner.