Multi-core is here to stay. The free lunch is over, and software will achieve the bulk of its future performance and scaling benefits via the use of concurrency.

This includes server-side cloud computing, but also fine-grained parallelism within client apps. Parallel Extensions to .NET includes new APIs and common infrastructure that makes it feasible to exploit these new processor capabilities.

This includes: Parallel LINQ, a data parallel implementation of LINQ-to-Objects enabling a functional and declarative approach to parallelism; the Task Parallel Library (TPL), providing object-oriented and imperative parallelism features; and, Coordination Data Structures (CDS), a suite of additional classes for common concurrency patterns, including a set of scalable, often lock-free collections.