Threads, Asynchrony, Parallelism, and Concurrency in C#

The concepts of process, thread, and task are fundamental to understanding the working of an operating system. You should have a good understanding of threads and how they work to learn asynchrony, parallelism, and concurrency. This article discusses the concepts related to these concepts in detail with relevant code examples wherever appropriate.

- Joydip Kanjilal

If you’re to work with the code examples discussed in this article, you need the following installed in your system:

• Visual Studio 2022

• .NET 9.0

• ASP.NET 9.0 Runtime

If you don’t already have Visual Studio 2022 installed on your computer, you can download it from here: https://visualstudio.microsoft.​com/downloads/.

I’ll start by showing you the basic concepts and then explore how you can program against each of them.

Overview of Threads, Multithreading, and Multitasking

In this section, I’ll examine threads, multithreading, multitasking, multiprocessing, and other related concepts. Before I delve deeply into these concepts, let’s understand what resources are in the context of an operating system.

Resources

Resources, in an operating system (OS), are components required by a process or thread to function. Typical examples of resources include hardware components, such as a central processing unit (CPU) time, memory space, input/output (I/O) devices (printers, disk drives), and files managed by the operating system to ensure that processes have access to these resources in a controlled and efficient manner. It’s extremely important for an operating system to apply proper algorithms and strategies to manage and control the allocation, scheduling, and release of resources to ensure seamless functioning of operations.

From the operating system’s perspective, there are two types of resources: preemptive resources and non-preemptive resources.