Threading - I am on a Journey

Recently it has become more and more apparent that I had a crack in my understanding of a key aspect of not only the CLR but computing in general. No prizes for guessing that it was threading and the general parallel programming constructs that go along with it.
Now I am not a complete n00b in the threading world, I have written code that uses threads in client and server side but it was typically handing off a single task to a single thread and looking back it was probably pretty delicate and by now in need of some re-factoring love.
The first real kick in the pants was playing with my 8 core machine and never seeing all 8 core light up in the task manager. How wasteful... its like all the Aston Martins I see driving over Tower Bridge; what is the point?
Next major trigger for me was a computationally heavy project that I, up until recently, was working on. My colleagues and I knew that splitting up tasks could make or break this system, however given a distinct lack of human resources and not exactly compelling hardware, time was never allocated to fleshing out the best approach.
Well I am no longer at that job (its somewhat unfortunate as the project could have been epic had it not be butchered by red tape and ego's) so I have had time to scrub up on my threading knowledge... well I thought I would just be scrubbing up. Sometimes you just don't know how much you don't know.

So in an attempt to short cut any one else's learning curve on the wonderful world of threading and parallel programming in the .Net world here are some great places to get started.

As always C# in a Nutshell is a great place to start with anything C# related. I have both 3.0 and 4.0, Joe is a great author; IMO every C# developer should have the latest copy of this book on their desk.

Next up the deceptively good CLR via C#. This book looks like its going to be as much fun as having teeth pulled out however it is surprisingly good and dives deep in the areas you want and would expect. I read the 2nd edition however will be buying the 3rd as soon as I can find it.
Obviously these books are not completely dedicated to threading but they have some great chapters dedicated to it. If you are after a more in depth reference I have been recommend Joe Duffys book : Concurrent Programming On Windows

Next up is my favourite learning tool : Tekpub. There is a threading production under way, it only has 1 episode but it is great. As I have a yearly subscription it was a no-brainer. For me this was valuable as it has a bunch of code and a great visual comparison of auto and manual reset events, Semaphores and Mutexes. I highly recommend this video if these are confusing you at all.

For a more casual and much briefer talk on Threading in the pre .Net 4 days check out Jon Skeets articles . I have found the multiple angles these guys talk about the same topic good for bashing it into my head.

The piece that I am currently reading is the PnP new book Parallel Programming with Microsoft .NET that is also available as a hard copy book and eBook. Code snippets for the text are available here.

The last piece that is semi related is my reading of the Manning book Real-World Functional Programming. Although functional programming technically has no direct link to threading its basic tenants strongly support parallel programming and as such I have been endeavouring to improve my understanding and use of functional constructs where it is appropriate. So far the books is very good it is in F# and C# so it has bee a good (re)introduction to F# for me.

With all of the movement in not only hardware (hyper-threaded and multi-core processors) as well as architectures (Grid, Cloud, ESBs etc) and the software frameworks we use (.Net's TPL, Rx etc) and how we use them (i.e the movement towards functional programming in distributed/parallel systems) I think it is becoming very clear that as .Net developers we need to know how this stuff works, how we can use it and what it means for the systems we build and the users that use them.

As tempting as it may be to run off and just blindly use the new TPL I strongly urge you to get a good understanding of the history and the older APM practices, I am sure this will ensure you will make better choices when you write your next parallel task.
As for me I'm back to reading, I have a long way to go...